Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde

Essays and Lectures

Contents

The Rise of Historical Criticism

The English Renaissance of Art

House Decoration

Art and the Handicraftman

Lecture to Art Students

London Models

Poems in Prose

THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the

civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that

complex working towards freedom which may be described as the

revolt against authority. It is merely one facet of that

speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action

produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the

parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a

factor of progress is based not so much on the results it attains,

as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method by

which it works.

Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is

not to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms

of Asia or the stationary civilisation of Egypt. The clay

cylinders of Assyria and Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the

pyramids, form not history but the material for history.

The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest

life of the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a

freedom from invention, which is almost unparalleled in the

writings of any people; but the protective spirit which is the

characteristic of that people proved as fatal to their literature

as to their commerce. Free criticism is as unknown as free trade.

While as regards the Hindus, their acute, analytical and logical

mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and philosophy than

to history or chronology. Indeed, in history their imagination

seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly mingled

together that any attempt to separate them seems vain. If we

except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian

Chandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truth

of their writings or examine their method of investigation.

It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that

history proper is to be found, as well as the spirit of historical

criticism; among that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans,

whom we call by the name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well

said, we owe all that moves in the world except the blind forces of

nature.

For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and

journeyed, a nomad people, to AEgean shores, the characteristic of

their nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of

historical criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklarung or

illumination of the intellect which seems to have burst on the

Greek race like a great flood of light about the sixth century B.C.

L'ESPRIT D'UN SIECLE NE NAIT PAS ET NE MEURT PAS E JOUR FIXE, and

the first critic is perhaps as difficult to discover as the first

man. It is from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its

intolerance of dogmatic authority, from physical science the

alluring analogies of law and order, from philosophy the conception

of an essential unity underlying the complex manifestations of

phenomena. It appears first rather as a changed attitude of mind

than as a principle of research, and its earliest influences are to

be found in the sacred writings.

For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in

matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the

spirit of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development,

it is not confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining

whether an event happened or not, but is concerned also with the

investigation into the causes of events, the general relations

which phenomena of life hold to one another, and in its ultimate

development passes into the wider question of the philosophy of

history.

Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two

spheres of sacred and uninspired history are essentially

manifestations of the same spirit, yet their methods are so

different, the canons of evidence so entirely separate, and the

motives in each case so unconnected, that it will be necessary for

a clear estimation of the progress of Greek thought, that we should

consider these two questions entirely apart from one another. I

shall then in both cases take the succession of writers in their

chronological order as representing the rational order - not that

the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that

dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives

its advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of

stagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual

development, not merely in the question of historical criticism,

but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems so

essentially normal, so free from all disturbing external

influences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in the

footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the order

sanctioned by reason.

CHAPTER II

AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks

reached that critical point in the history of every civilised

nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when

the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the

lower, material conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men

find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the

old bottles of a narrow and a trammelling creed.

From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a

mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove

to hide the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to

mar by imputed wickedness the perfection of God's nature - a very

shirt of Nessos in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped

annihilation. Now while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales,

and the alluring analogies of law and order afforded by physical

science, were most important forces in encouraging the rise of the

spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its ethical side that the Greek

mythology was chiefly open to attack.

It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man

will admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he

worships; so the first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown

in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the

evil things said by Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told

of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders

of Greek theology,' we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as

clearly as we see the Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of

Dante.

Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon

succumbed before the destructive effects of the A PRIORI ethical

criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom,

found immediately a convenient shelter under the aegis of the

doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings.

To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls

of Troy was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden

certain moral and physical truths. The contest between Athena and

Ares was that eternal contest between rational thought and the

brute force of ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of

the 'Far Darter' were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot

from the golden bow of the child of God, but the common rays of the

sun, which was itself nothing but a mere inert mass of burning

metal.

Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis,

has ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn.

There were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the [Greek

text which cannot be reproduced] a mere metaphor for atmospheric

power.

Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings

must be ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it

was essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly

pointed out by Plato, who showed that while this theory will no

doubt explain many of the current legends, yet, if it is to be

appealed to at all, it must be as a universal principle; a position

he is by no means prepared to admit.

Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples,

and furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was

analysed into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp

representing the premises, and the woof the conclusion.

Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred

writings as an essentially dangerous method, proving either too

much or too little, Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of

attack, and re-writes history with a didactic purpose, laying down

certain ethical canons of historical criticism. God is good; God

is just; God is true; God is without the common passions of men.

These are the tests to which we are to bring the stories of the

Greek religion.

'God predestines no men to ruin, nor sends destruction on innocent

cities; He never walks the earth in strange disguise, nor has to

mourn for the death of any well-beloved son. Away with the tears

for Sarpedon, the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of

the broken covenant!' (Plato, REPUBLIC, Book ii. 380; iii. 388,

391.)

Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of

the days of old, and by the same A PRIORI principles Achilles is

rescued from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage

which may be recited as the earliest instance of that 'whitewashing

of great men,' as it has been called, which is so popular in our

own day, when Catiline and Clodius are represented as honest and

far-seeing politicians, when EINE EDLE UND GUTE NATUR is claimed

for Tiberius, and Nero is rescued from his heritage of infamy as an

accomplished DILETTANTE whose moral aberrations are more than

excused by his exquisite artistic sense and charming tenor voice.

But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the

ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which

may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of

Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it.

Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had

discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a

column erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on

earth, this shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and

heroes of ancient Greece were 'mere ordinary mortals, whose

achievements had been a good deal exaggerated and misrepresented,'

and that the proper canon of historical criticism as regards the

treatment of myths was to rationalise the incredible, and to

present the plausible residuum as actual truth.

To him and his school, the centaurs, for instance, those mythical

sons of the storm, strange links between the lives of men and

animals, were merely some youths from the village of Nephele in

Thessaly, distinguished for their sporting tastes; the 'living

harvest of panoplied knights,' which sprang so mystically from the

dragon's teeth, a body of mercenary troops supported by the profits

on a successful speculation in ivory; and Actaeon, an ordinary

master of hounds, who, living before the days of subscription, was

eaten out of house and home by the expenses of his kennel.

Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of

historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely

probable by the modern investigations into the workings of the

mythopoeic spirit in post-Christian times. Charlemagne and Roland,

St. Francis and William Tell, are none the less real personages

because their histories are filled with much that is fictitious and

incredible, but in all cases what is essentially necessary is some

external corroboration, such as is afforded by the mention of

Roland and Roncesvalles in the chronicles of England, or (in the

sphere of Greek legend) by the excavations of Hissarlik. But to

rob a mythical narrative of its kernel of supernatural elements,

and to present the dry husk thus obtained as historical fact, is,

as has been well said, to mistake entirely the true method of

investigation and to identify plausibility with truth.

And as regards the critical point urged by Palaiphatos, Strabo, and

Polybius, that pure invention on Homer's part is inconceivable, we

may without scruple allow it, for myths, like constitutions, grow

gradually, and are not formed in a day. But between a poet's

deliberate creation and historical accuracy there is a wide field

of the mythopoeic faculty.

This Euhemeristic theory was welcomed as an essentially

philosophical and critical method by the unscientific Romans, to

whom it was introduced by the poet Ennius, that pioneer of

cosmopolitan Hellenicism, and it continued to characterise the tone

of ancient thought on the question of the treatment of mythology

till the rise of Christianity, when it was turned by such writers

as Augustine and Minucius Felix into a formidable weapon of attack

on Paganism. It was then abandoned by all those who still bent the

knee to Athena or to Zeus, and a general return, aided by the

philosophic mystics of Alexandria, to the allegorising principle of

interpretation took place, as the only means of saving the deities

of Olympus from the Titan assaults of the new Galilean God. In

what vain defence, the statue of Mary set in the heart of the

Pantheon can best tell us.

Religions, however, may be absorbed, but they never are disproved,

and the stories of the Greek mythology, spiritualised by the

purifying influence of Christianity, reappear in many of the

southern parts of Europe in our own day. The old fable that the

Greek gods took service with the new religion under assumed names

has more truth in it than the many care to discover.

Having now traced the progress of historical criticism in the

special treatment of myth and legend, I shall proceed to

investigate the form in which the same spirit manifested itself as

regards what one may term secular history and secular historians.

The field traversed will be found to be in some respects the same,

but the mental attitude, the spirit, the motive of investigation

are all changed.

There were heroes before the son of Atreus and historians before

Herodotus, yet the latter is rightly hailed as the father of

history, for in him we discover not merely the empirical connection

of cause and effect, but that constant reference to Laws, which is

the characteristic of the historian proper.

For all history must be essentially universal; not in the sense of

comprising all the synchronous events of the past time, but through

the universality of the principles employed. And the great

conceptions which unify the work of Herodotus are such as even

modern thought has not yet rejected. The immediate government of

the world by God, the nemesis and punishment which sin and pride

invariably bring with them, the revealing of God's purpose to His

people by signs and omens, by miracles and by prophecy; these are

to Herodotus the laws which govern the phenomena of history. He is

essentially the type of supernatural historian; his eyes are ever

strained to discern the Spirit of God moving over the face of the

waters of life; he is more concerned with final than with efficient

causes.

Yet we can discern in him the rise of that HISTORIC SENSE which is

the rational antecedent of the science of historical criticism, the

[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], to use the words of a

Greek writer, as opposed to that which comes either [Greek text

which cannot be reproduced].

He has passed through the valley of faith and has caught a glimpse

of the sunlit heights of Reason; but like all those who, while

accepting the supernatural, yet attempt to apply the canons of

rationalism, he is essentially inconsistent. For the better

apprehension of the character of this historic sense in Herodotus

it will be necessary to examine at some length the various forms of

criticism in which it manifests itself.

Such fabulous stories as that of the Phoenix, of the goat-footed

men, of the headless beings with eyes in their breasts, of the men

who slept six months in the year ([Greek text which cannot be

reproduced]), of the wer-wolf of the Neuri, and the like, are

entirely rejected by him as being opposed to the ordinary

experience of life, and to those natural laws whose universal

influence the early Greek physical philosophers had already made

known to the world of thought. Other legends, such as the suckling

of Cyrus by a bitch, or the feather-rain of northern Europe, are

rationalised and explained into a woman's name and a fall of snow.

The supernatural origin of the Scythian nation, from the union of

Hercules and the monstrous Echidna, is set aside by him for the

more probable account that they were a nomad tribe driven by the

Massagetae from Asia; and he appeals to the local names of their

country as proof of the fact that the Kimmerians were the original

possessors.

But in the case of Herodotus it will be more instructive to pass on

from points like these to those questions of general probability,

the true apprehension of which depends rather on a certain quality

of mind than on any possibility of formulated rules, questions

which form no unimportant part of scientific history; for it must

be remembered always that the canons of historical criticism are

essentially different from those of judicial evidence, for they

cannot, like the latter, be made plain to every ordinary mind, but

appeal to a certain historical faculty founded on the experience of

life. Besides, the rules for the reception of evidence in courts

of law are purely stationary, while the science of historical

probability is essentially progressive, and changes with the

advancing spirit of each age.

Now, of all the speculative canons of historical criticism, none is

more important than that which rests on psychological probability.

Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the

presence of Helen within the walls of Troy. Had she been there, he

says, Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad ([Greek

text which cannot be reproduced]) as not to give her up, when they

and their children and their city were in such peril (ii. 118); and

as regards the authority of Homer, some incidental passages in his

poem show that he knew of Helen's sojourn in Egypt during the

siege, but selected the other story as being a more suitable motive

for an epic. Similarly he does not believe that the Alcmaeonidae

family, a family who had always been the haters of tyranny ([Greek

text which cannot be reproduced]), and to whom, even more than to

Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever

have been so treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of

Marathon as a signal for the Persian host to fall on the city. A

shield, he acknowledges, was held up, but it could not possibly

have been done by such friends of liberty as the house of Alcmaeon;

nor will he believe that a great king like Rhampsinitus would have

sent his daughter [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of

probability; a Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been

rich enough to build a pyramid, and, besides, on chronological

grounds the story is impossible (ii. 134).

In another passage (ii. 63), after giving an account of the

forcible entry of the priests of Ares into the chapel of the god's

mother, which seems to have been a sort of religious faction fight

where sticks were freely used ([Greek text which cannot be

reproduced]), 'I feel sure,' he says, 'that many of them died from

getting their heads broken, notwithstanding the assertions of the

Egyptian priests to the contrary.' There is also something

charmingly naive in the account he gives of the celebrated Greek

swimmer who dived a distance of eighty stadia to give his

countrymen warning of the Persian advance. 'If, however,' he says,

'I may offer an opinion on the subject, I would say that he came in

a boat.'

There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the

instances I have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands

on the borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note

even the most minute instances of the rise of the critical and

sceptical spirit of inquiry.

How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, be shown

by a reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic

tests to matters connected with religion. He nowhere, indeed,

grapples with the moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek

Bible; and where he rejects as incredible the marvellous

achievements of Hercules in Egypt, he does so on the express

grounds that he had not yet been received among the gods, and so

was still subject to the ordinary conditions of mortal life ([Greek

text which cannot be reproduced]).

Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems

to have been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage

(ii. 45) concludes with a pious hope that God will pardon him for

having gone so far, the great rationalistic passage being, of

course, that in which he rejects the mythical account of the

foundation of Dodona. 'How can a dove speak with a human voice?'

he asks, and rationalises the bird into a foreign princess.

Similarly he seems more inclined to believe that the great storm at

the beginning of the Persian War ceased from ordinary atmospheric

causes, and not in consequence of the incantations of the MAGIANS.

He calls Melampos, whom the majority of the Greeks looked on as an

inspired prophet, 'a clever man who had acquired for himself the

art of prophecy'; and as regards the miracle told of the AEginetan

statues of the primeval deities of Damia and Auxesia, that they

fell on their knees when the sacrilegious Athenians strove to carry

them off, 'any one may believe it,' he says, 'who likes, but as for

myself, I place no credence in the tale.'

So much then for the rationalistic spirit of historical criticism,

as far as it appears explicitly in the works of this great and

philosophic writer; but for an adequate appreciation of his

position we must also note how conscious he was of the value of

documentary evidence, of the use of inscriptions, of the importance

of the poets as throwing light on manners and customs as well as on

historical incidents. No writer of any age has more vividly

recognised the fact that history is a matter of evidence, and that

it is as necessary for the historian to state his authority as it

is to produce one's witnesses in a court of law.

While, however, we can discern in Herodotus the rise of an historic

sense, we must not blind ourselves to the large amount of instances

where he receives supernatural influences as part of the ordinary

forces of life. Compared to Thucydides, who succeeded him in the

development of history, he appears almost like a mediaeval writer

matched with a modern rationalist. For, contemporary though they

were, between these two authors there is an infinite chasm of

thought.

The essential difference of their methods may be best illustrated

from those passages where they treat of the same subject. The

execution of the Spartan heralds, Nicolaos and Aneristos, during

the Peloponnesian War is regarded by Herodotus as one of the most

supernatural instances of the workings of nemesis and the wrath of

an outraged hero; while the lengthened siege and ultimate fall of

Troy was brought about by the avenging hand of God desiring to

manifest unto men the mighty penalties which always follow upon

mighty sins. But Thucydides either sees not, or desires not to

see, in either of these events the finger of Providence, or the

punishment of wicked doers. The death of the heralds is merely an

Athenian retaliation for similar outrages committed by the opposite

side; the long agony of the ten years' siege is due merely to the

want of a good commissariat in the Greek army; while the fall of

the city is the result of a united military attack consequent on a

good supply of provisions.

Now, it is to be observed that in this latter passage, as well as

elsewhere, Thucydides is in no sense of the word a sceptic as

regards his attitude towards the truth of these ancient legends.

Agamemnon and Atreus, Theseus and Eurystheus, even Minos, about

whom Herodotus has some doubts, are to him as real personages as

Alcibiades or Gylippus. The points in his historical criticism of

the past are, first, his rejection of all extra-natural

interference, and, secondly, the attributing to these ancient

heroes the motives and modes of thought of his own day. The

present was to him the key to the explanation of the past, as it

was to the prediction of the future.

Now, as regards his attitude towards the supernatural he is at one

with modern science. We too know that, just as the primeval coal-

beds reveal to us the traces of rain-drops and other atmospheric

phenomena similar to those of our own day, so, in estimating the

history of the past, the introduction of no force must be allowed

whose workings we cannot observe among the phenomena around us. To

lay down canons of ultra-historical credibility for the explanation

of events which happen to have preceded us by a few thousand years,

is as thoroughly unscientific as it is to intermingle preternatural

in geological theories.

Whatever the canons of art may be, no difficulty in history is so

great as to warrant the introduction of a spirit of spirit [Greek

text which cannot be reproduced], in the sense of a violation of

the laws of nature.

Upon the other point, however, Thucydides falls into an

anachronism. To refuse to allow the workings of chivalrous and

self-denying motives among the knights of the Trojan crusade,

because he saw none in the faction-loving Athenian of his own day,

is to show an entire ignorance of the various characteristics of

human nature developing under different circumstances, and to deny

to a primitive chieftain like Agamemnon that authority founded on

opinion, to which we give the name of divine right, is to fall into

an historical error quite as gross as attributing to Atreus the

courting of the populace ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced])

with a view to the Mycenean throne.

The general method of historical criticism pursued by Thucydides

having been thus indicated, it remains to proceed more into detail

as regards those particular points where he claims for himself a

more rational method of estimating evidence than either the public

or his predecessors possessed.

'So little pains,' he remarks, 'do the vulgar take in the

investigation of truth, satisfied with their preconceived

opinions,' that the majority of the Greeks believe in a Pitanate

cohort of the Spartan army and in a double vote being the

prerogative of the Spartan kings, neither of which opinions has any

foundation in fact. But the chief point on which he lays stress as

evincing the 'uncritical way with which men receive legends, even

the legends of their own country,' is the entire baselessness of

the common Athenian tradition in which Harmodios and Aristogeiton

were represented as the patriotic liberators of Athens from the

Peisistratid tyranny. So far, he points out, from the love of

freedom being their motive, both of them were influenced by merely

personal considerations, Aristogeiton being jealous of Hipparchos'

attention to Harmodios, then a beautiful boy in the flower of Greek

loveliness, while the latter's indignation was aroused by an insult

offered to his sister by the prince.

Their motives, then, were personal revenge, while the result of

their conspiracy served only to rivet more tightly the chains of

servitude which bound Athens to the Peisistratid house, for

Hipparchos, whom they killed, was only the tyrant's younger

brother, and not the tyrant himself.

To prove his theory that Hippias was the elder, he appeals to the

evidence afforded by a public inscription in which his name occurs

immediately after that of his father, a point which he thinks shows

that he was the eldest, and so the heir. This view he further

corroborates by another inscription, on the altar of Apollo, which

mentions the children of Hippias and not those of his brothers;

'for it was natural for the eldest to be married first'; and

besides this, on the score of general probability he points out

that, had Hippias been the younger, he would not have so easily

obtained the tyranny on the death of Hipparchos.

Now, what is important in Thucydides, as evinced in the treatment

of legend generally, is not the results he arrived at, but the

method by which he works. The first great rationalistic historian,

he may be said to have paved the way for all those who followed

after him, though it must always be remembered that, while the

total absence in his pages of all the mystical paraphernalia of the

supernatural theory of life is an advance in the progress of

rationalism, and an era in scientific history, whose importance

could never be over-estimated, yet we find along with it a total

absence of any mention of those various social and economical

forces which form such important factors in the evolution of the

world, and to which Herodotus rightly gave great prominence in his

immortal work. The history of Thucydides is essentially one-sided

and incomplete. The intricate details of sieges and battles,

subjects with which the historian proper has really nothing to do

except so far as they may throw light on the spirit of the age, we

would readily exchange for some notice of the condition of private

society in Athens, or the influence and position of women.

There is an advance in the method of historical criticism; there is

an advance in the conception and motive of history itself; for in

Thucydides we may discern that natural reaction against the

intrusion of didactic and theological considerations into the

sphere of the pure intellect, the spirit of which may be found in

the Euripidean treatment of tragedy and the later schools of art,

as well as in the Platonic conception of science.

History, no doubt, has splendid lessons for our instruction, just

as all good art comes to us as the herald of the noblest truth.

But, to set before either the painter or the historian the

inculcation of moral lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued,

is to miss entirely the true motive and characteristic both of art

and history, which is in the one case the creation of beauty, in

the other the discovery of the laws of the evolution of progress:

IL NE FAUT DEMANDER DE L'ART QUE L'ART, DU PASSE QUE LE PASSE.

Herodotus wrote to illustrate the wonderful ways of Providence and

the nemesis that falls on sin, and his work is a good example of

the truth that nothing can dispense with criticism so much as a

moral aim. Thucydides has no creed to preach, no doctrine to

prove. He analyses the results which follow inevitably from

certain antecedents, in order that on a recurrence of the same

crisis men may know how to act.

His object was to discover the laws of the past so as to serve as a

light to illumine the future. We must not confuse the recognition

of the utility of history with any ideas of a didactic aim. Two

points more in Thucydides remain for our consideration: his

treatment of the rise of Greek civilisation, and of the primitive

condition of Hellas, as well as the question how far can he be said

really to have recognised the existence of laws regulating the

complex phenomena of life.

CHAPTER III

THE investigation into the two great problems of the origin of

society and the philosophy of history occupies such an important

position in the evolution of Greek thought that, to obtain any

clear view of the workings of the critical spirit, it will be

necessary to trace at some length their rise and scientific

development as evinced not merely in the works of historians

proper, but also in the philosophical treatises of Plato and

Aristotle. The important position which these two great thinkers

occupy in the progress of historical criticism can hardly be over-

estimated. I do not mean merely as regards their treatment of the

Greek Bible, and Plato's endeavours to purge sacred history of its

immorality by the application of ethical canons at the time when

Aristotle was beginning to undermine the basis of miracles by his

scientific conception of law, but with reference to these two wider

questions of the rise of civil institutions and the philosophy of

history.

And first, as regards the current theories of the primitive

condition of society, there was a wide divergence of opinion in

Hellenic society, just as there is now. For while the majority of

the orthodox public, of whom Hesiod may be taken as the

representative, looked back, as a great many of our own day still

do, to a fabulous age of innocent happiness, a BELL' ETE DELL'

AURO, where sin and death were unknown and men and women were like

Gods, the foremost men of intellect such as Aristotle and Plato,

AEschylus and many of the other poets (1) saw in primitive man 'a

few small sparks of humanity preserved on the tops of mountains

after some deluge,' 'without an idea of cities, governments or

legislation,' 'living the lives of wild beasts in sunless caves,'

'their only law being the survival of the fittest.'

And this, too, was the opinion of Thucydides, whose ARCHAEOLOGIA as

it is contains a most valuable disquisition on the early condition

of Hellas, which it will be necessary to examine at some length.

Now, as regards the means employed generally by Thucydides for the

elucidation of ancient history, I have already pointed out how

that, while acknowledging that 'it is the tendency of every poet to

exaggerate, as it is of every chronicler to seek to be attractive

at the expense of truth; he yet assumes in the thoroughly

euhemeristic way, that under the veil of myth and legend there does

yet exist a rational basis of fact discoverable by the method of

rejecting all supernatural interference as well as any

extraordinary motives influencing the actors. It is in complete

accordance with this spirit that he appeals, for instance, to the

Homeric epithet of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as

applied to Corinth, as a proof of the early commercial prosperity

of that city; to the fact of the generic name HELLENES not

occurring in the ILIAD as a corroboration of his theory of the

essentially disunited character of the primitive Greek tribes; and

he argues from the line 'O'er many islands and all Argos ruled,' as

applied to Agamemnon, that his forces must have been partially

naval, 'for Agamemnon's was a continental power, and he could not

have been master of any but the adjacent islands, and these would

not be many but through the possession of a fleet.'

Anticipating in some measure the comparative method of research, he

argues from the fact of the more barbarous Greek tribes, such as

the AEtolians and Acarnanians, still carrying arms in his own day,

that this custom was the case originally over the whole country.

'The fact,' he says, 'that the people in these parts of Hellas are

still living in the old way points to a time when the same mode of

life was equally common to all.' Similarly, in another passage, he

shows how a corroboration of his theory of the respectable

character of piracy in ancient days is afforded by 'the honour with

which some of the inhabitants of the continent still regard a

successful marauder,' as well as by the fact that the question,

'Are you a pirate?' is a common feature of primitive society as

shown in the poets; and finally, after observing how the old Greek

custom of wearing belts in gymnastic contests still survived among

the more uncivilised Asiatic tribes, he observes that there are

many other points in which a likeness may be shown between the life

of the primitive Hellenes and that of the barbarians to-day.'

As regards the evidence afforded by ancient remains, while adducing

as a proof of the insecure character of early Greek society the

fact of their cities (2) being always built at some distance from

the sea, yet he is careful to warn us, and the caution ought to be

borne in mind by all archaeologists, that we have no right to

conclude from the scanty remains of any city that its legendary

greatness in primitive times was a mere exaggeration. 'We are not

justified,' he says, 'in rejecting the tradition of the magnitude

of the Trojan armament, because Mycenae and the other towns of that

age seem to us small and insignificant. For, if Lacedaemon was to

become desolate, any antiquarian judging merely from its ruins

would be inclined to regard the tale of the Spartan hegemony as an

idle myth; for the city is a mere collection of villages after the

old fashion of Hellas, and has none of those splendid public

buildings and temples which characterise Athens, and whose remains,

in the case of the latter city, would be so marvellous as to lead

the superficial observer into an exaggerated estimate of the

Athenian power.' Nothing can be more scientific than the

archaeological canons laid down, whose truth is strikingly

illustrated to any one who has compared the waste fields of the

Eurotas plain with the lordly monuments of the Athenian acropolis.

(3)

On the other hand, Thucydides is quite conscious of the value of

the positive evidence afforded by archaeological remains. He

appeals, for instance, to the character of the armour found in the

Delian tombs and the peculiar mode of sepulture, as corroboration

of his theory of the predominance of the Carian element among the

primitive islanders, and to the concentration of all the temples

either in the Acropolis, or in its immediate vicinity, to the name

of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] by which it was still

known, and to the extraordinary sanctity of the spring of water

there, as proof that the primitive city was originally confined to

the citadel, and the district immediately beneath it (ii. 16). And

lastly, in the very opening of his history, anticipating one of the

most scientific of modern methods, he points out how in early

states of civilisation immense fertility of the soil tends to

favour the personal aggrandisement of individuals, and so to stop

the normal progress of the country through 'the rise of factions,

that endless source of ruin'; and also by the allurements it offers

to a foreign invader, to necessitate a continual change of

population, one immigration following on another. He exemplifies

his theory by pointing to the endless political revolutions that

characterised Arcadia, Thessaly and Boeotia, the three richest

spots in Greece, as well as by the negative instance of the

undisturbed state in primitive time of Attica, which was always

remarkable for the dryness and poverty of its soil.

Now, while undoubtedly in these passages we may recognise the first

anticipation of many of the most modern principles of research, we

must remember how essentially limited is the range of the

ARCHAEOLOGIA, and how no theory at all is offered on the wider

questions of the general conditions of the rise and progress of

humanity, a problem which is first scientifically discussed in the

REPUBLIC of Plato.

And at the outset it must be premised that, while the study of

primitive man is an essentially inductive science, resting rather

on the accumulation of evidence than on speculation, among the

Greeks it was prosecuted rather on deductive principles.

Thucydides did, indeed, avail himself of the opportunities afforded

by the unequal development of civilisation in his own day in

Greece, and in the places I have pointed out seems to have

anticipated the comparative method. But we do not find later

writers availing themselves of the wonderfully accurate and

picturesque accounts given by Herodotus of the customs of savage

tribes. To take one instance, which bears a good deal on modern

questions, we find in the works of this great traveller the gradual

and progressive steps in the development of the family life clearly

manifested in the mere gregarious herding together of the

Agathyrsi, their primitive kinsmanship through women in common, and

the rise of a feeling of paternity from a state of polyandry. This

tribe stood at that time on that borderland between umbilical

relationship and the family which has been such a difficult point

for modern anthropologists to find.

The ancient authors, however, are unanimous in insisting that the

family is the ultimate unit of society, though, as I have said, an

inductive study of primitive races, or even the accounts given of

them by Herodotus, would have shown them that the [Greek text which

cannot be reproduced] of a personal household, to use Plato's

expression, is really a most complex notion appearing always in a

late stage of civilisation, along with recognition of private

property and the rights of individualism.

Philology also, which in the hands of modern investigators has

proved such a splendid instrument of research, was in ancient days

studied on principles too unscientific to be of much use.

Herodotus points out that the word ERIDANOS is essentially Greek in

character, that consequently the river supposed to run round the

world is probably a mere Greek invention. His remarks, however, on

language generally, as in the case of PIROMIS and the ending of the

Persian names, show on what unsound basis his knowledge of language

rested.

In the BACCHAE of Euripides there is an extremely interesting

passage in which the immoral stories of the Greek mythology are

accounted for on the principle of that misunderstanding of words

and metaphors to which modern science has given the name of a

disease of language. In answer to the impious rationalism of

Pentheus - a sort of modern Philistine - Teiresias, who may be

termed the Max Muller of the Theban cycle, points out that the

story of Dionysus being inclosed in Zeus' thigh really arose from

the linguistic confusion between [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced] and [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

On the whole, however - for I have quoted these two instances only

to show the unscientific character of early philology - we may say

that this important instrument in recreating the history of the

past was not really used by the ancients as a means of historical

criticism. Nor did the ancients employ that other method, used to

such advantage in our own day, by which in the symbolism and

formulas of an advanced civilisation we can detect the unconscious

survival of ancient customs: for, whereas in the sham capture of

the bride at a marriage feast, which was common in Wales till a

recent time, we can discern the lingering reminiscence of the

barbarous habit of exogamy, the ancient writers saw only the

deliberate commemoration of an historical event.

Aristotle does not tell us by what method he discovered that the

Greeks used to buy their wives in primitive times, but, judging by

his general principles, it was probably through some legend or myth

on the subject which lasted to his own day, and not, as we would

do, by arguing back from the marriage presents given to the bride

and her relatives. (4)

The origin of the common proverb 'worth so many beeves,' in which

we discern the unconscious survival of a purely pastoral state of

society before the use of metals was known, is ascribed by Plutarch

to the fact of Theseus having coined money bearing a bull's head.

Similarly, the Amathusian festival, in which a young man imitated

the labours of a woman in travail, is regarded by him as a rite

instituted in Ariadne's honour, and the Carian adoration of

asparagus as a simple commemoration of the adventure of the nymph

Perigune. In the first of these WE discern the beginning of

agnation and kinsmanship through the father, which still lingers in

the 'couvee' of New Zealand tribes: while the second is a relic of

the totem and fetish worship of plants.

Now, in entire opposition to this modern inductive principle of

research stands the philosophic Plato, whose account of primitive

man is entirely speculative and deductive.

The origin of society he ascribes to necessity, the mother of all

inventions, and imagines that individual man began deliberately to

herd together on account of the advantages of the principle of

division of labour and the rendering of mutual need.

It must, however, be borne in mind that Plato's object in this

whole passage in the REPUBLIC was, perhaps, not so much to analyse

the conditions of early society as to illustrate the importance of

the division of labour, the shibboleth of his political economy, by

showing what a powerful factor it must have been in the most

primitive as well as in the most complex states of society; just as

in the LAWS he almost rewrites entirely the history of the

Peloponnesus in order to prove the necessity of a balance of power.

He surely, I mean, must have recognised himself how essentially

incomplete his theory was in taking no account of the origin of

family life, the position and influence of women, and other social

questions, as well as in disregarding those deeper motives of

religion, which are such important factors in early civilisation,

and whose influence Aristotle seems to have clearly apprehended,

when he says that the aim of primitive society was not merely life

but the higher life, and that in the origin of society utility is

not the sole motive, but that there is something spiritual in it

if, at least, 'spiritual' will bring out the meaning of that

complex expression [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

Otherwise, the whole account in the REPUBLIC of primitive man will

always remain as a warning against the intrusion of A PRIORI

speculations in the domain appropriate to induction.

Now, Aristotle's theory of the origin of society, like his

philosophy of ethics, rests ultimately on the principle of final

causes, not in the theological meaning of an aim or tendency

imposed from without, but in the scientific sense of function

corresponding to organ. 'Nature maketh no thing in vain' is the

text of Aristotle in this as in other inquiries. Man being the

only animal possessed of the power of rational speech is, he

asserts, by nature intended to be social, more so than the bee or

any other gregarious animal.

He is [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], and the national

tendency towards higher forms of perfection brings the 'armed

savage who used to sell his wife' to the free independence of a

free state, and to the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced],

which was the test of true citizenship. The stages passed through

by humanity start with the family first as the ultimate unit.

The conglomeration of families forms a village ruled by that

patriarchal sway which is the oldest form of government in the

world, as is shown by the fact that all men count it to be the

constitution of heaven, and the villages are merged into the state,

and here the progression stops.

For Aristotle, like all Greek thinkers, found his ideal within the

walls of the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], yet perhaps

in his remark that a united Greece would rule the world we may

discern some anticipation of that 'federal union of free states

into one consolidated empire' which, more than the [Greek text

which cannot be reproduced], is to our eyes the ultimately perfect

polity.

How far Aristotle was justified in regarding the family as the

ultimate unit, with the materials afforded to him by Greek

literature, I have already noticed. Besides, Aristotle, I may

remark, had he reflected on the meaning of that Athenian law which,

while prohibiting marriage with a uterine sister, permitted it with

a sister-german, or on the common tradition in Athens that before

the time of Cecrops children bore their mothers' names, or on some

of the Spartan regulations, could hardly have failed to see the

universality of kinsmanship through women in early days, and the

late appearance of monandry. Yet, while he missed this point, in

common, it must be acknowledged, with many modern writers, such as

Sir Henry Maine, it is essentially as an explorer of inductive

instances that we recognise his improvement on Plato. The treatise

[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], did it remain to us in its

entirety, would have been one of the most valuable landmarks in the

progress of historical criticism, and the first scientific treatise

on the science of comparative politics.

A few fragments still remain to us, in one of which we find

Aristotle appealing to the authority of an ancient inscription on

the 'Disk of Iphitus,' one of the most celebrated Greek

antiquities, to corroborate his theory of the Lycurgean revival of

the Olympian festival; while his enormous research is evinced in

the elaborate explanation he gives of the historical origin of

proverbs such as [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], of

religious songs like the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of

the Botticean virgins, or the praises of love and war.

And, finally, it is to be observed how much wider than Plato's his

theory of the origin of society is. They both rest on a

psychological basis, but Aristotle's recognition of the capacity

for progress and the tendency towards a higher life shows how much

deeper his knowledge of human nature was.

In imitation of these two philosophers, Polybius gives an account

of the origin of society in the opening to his philosophy of

history. Somewhat in the spirit of Plato, he imagines that after

one of the cyclic deluges which sweep off mankind at stated periods

and annihilate all pre-existing civilisation, the few surviving

members of humanity coalesce for mutual protection, and, as in the

case with ordinary animals, the one most remarkable for physical

strength is elected king. In a short time, owing to the workings

of sympathy and the desire of approbation, the moral qualities

begin to make their appearance, and intellectual instead of bodily

excellence becomes the qualification for sovereignty.

Other points, as the rise of law and the like, are dwelt on in a

somewhat modern spirit, and although Polybius seems not to have

employed the inductive method of research in this question, or

rather, I should say, of the hierarchical order of the rational

progress of ideas in life, he is not far removed from what the

laborious investigations of modern travellers have given us.

And, indeed, as regards the working of the speculative faculty in

the creation of history, it is in all respects marvellous how that

the most truthful accounts of the passage from barbarism to

civilisation in ancient literature come from the works of poets.

The elaborate researches of Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have

done little more than verify the theories put forward in the

PROMETHEUS BOUND and the DE NATURA RERUM; yet neither AEschylus nor

Lucretias followed in the modern path, but rather attained to truth

by a certain almost mystic power of creative imagination, such as

we now seek to banish from science as a dangerous power, though to

it science seems to owe many of its most splendid generalities. (5)

Leaving then the question of the origin of society as treated by

the ancients, I shall now turn to the other and the more important

question of how far they may he said to have attained to what we

call the philosophy of history.

Now at the outset we must note that, while the conceptions of law

and order have been universally received as the governing

principles of the phenomena of nature in the sphere of physical

science, yet their intrusion into the domain of history and the

life of man has always been met with a strong opposition, on the

ground of the incalculable nature of two great forces acting on

human action, a certain causeless spontaneity which men call free

will, and the extra-natural interference which they attribute as a

constant attribute to God.

Now, that there is a science of the apparently variable phenomena

of history is a conception which WE have perhaps only recently

begun to appreciate; yet, like all other great thoughts, it seems

to have come to the Greek mind spontaneously, through a certain

splendour of imagination, in the morning tide of their

civilisation, before inductive research had armed them with the

instruments of verification. For I think it is possible to discern

in some of the mystic speculations of the early Greek thinkers that

desire to discover what is that 'invariable existence of which

there are variable states,' and to incorporate it in some one

formula of law which may serve to explain the different

manifestations of all organic bodies, MAN INCLUDED, which is the

germ of the philosophy of history; the germ indeed of an idea of

which it is not too much to say that on it any kind of historical

criticism, worthy of the name, must ultimately rest.

For the very first requisite for any scientific conception of

history is the doctrine of uniform sequence: in other words, that

certain events having happened, certain other events corresponding

to them will happen also; that the past is the key of the future.

Now at the birth of this great conception science, it is true,

presided, yet religion it was which at the outset clothed it in its

own garb, and familiarised men with it by appealing to their hearts

first and then to their intellects; knowing that at the beginning

of things it is through the moral nature, and not through the

intellectual, that great truths are spread.

So in Herodotus, who may be taken as a representative of the

orthodox tone of thought, the idea of the uniform sequence of cause

and effect appears under the theological aspect of Nemesis and

Providence, which is really the scientific conception of law, only

it is viewed from an ETHICAL standpoint.

Now in Thucydides the philosophy of history rests on the

probability, which the uniformity of human nature affords us, that

the future will in the course of human things resemble the past, if

not reproduce it. He appears to contemplate a recurrence of the

phenomena of history as equally certain with a return of the

epidemic of the Great Plague.

Notwithstanding what German critics have written on the subject, we

must beware of regarding this conception as a mere reproduction of

that cyclic theory of events which sees in the world nothing but

the regular rotation of Strophe and Antistrophe, in the eternal

choir of life and death.

For, in his remarks on the excesses of the Corcyrean Revolution,

Thucydides distinctly rests his idea of the recurrence of history

on the psychological grounds of the general sameness of mankind.

'The sufferings,' he says, 'which revolution entailed upon the

cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always

will occurs as long as human nature remains the same, though in a

severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms according to

the variety of the particular cases.

'In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better

sentiments, because they are not confronted with imperious

necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of men's wants, and

so proves a hard taskmaster, which brings most men's characters to

a level with their fortunes.'

CHAPTER IV

IT is evident that here Thucydides is ready to admit the variety of

manifestations which external causes bring about in their workings

on the uniform character of the nature of man. Yet, after all is

said, these are perhaps but very general statements: the ordinary

effects of peace and war are dwelt on, but there is no real

analysis of the immediate causes and general laws of the phenomena

of life, nor does Thucydides seem to recognise the truth that if

humanity proceeds in circles, the circles are always widening.

Perhaps we may say that with him the philosophy of history is

partly in the metaphysical stage, and see, in the progress of this

idea from Herodotus to Polybius, the exemplification of the Comtian

Law of the three stages of thought, the theological, the

metaphysical, and the scientific: for truly out of the vagueness

of theological mysticism this conception which we call the

Philosophy of History was raised to a scientific principle,

according to which the past was explained and the future predicted

by reference to general laws.

Now, just as the earliest account of the nature of the progress of

humanity is to be found in Plato, so in him we find the first

explicit attempt to found a universal philosophy of history upon

wide rational grounds. Having created an ideally perfect state,

the philosopher proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex

causes which produce revolutions, of the moral effects of various

forms of government and education, of the rise of the criminal

classes and their connection with pauperism, and, in a word, to

create history by the deductive method and to proceed from A PRIORI

psychological principles to discover the governing laws of the

apparent chaos of political life.

There have been many attempts since Plato to deduce from a single

philosophical principle all the phenomena which experience

subsequently verifies for us. Fichte thought he could predict the

world-plan from the idea of universal time. Hegel dreamed he had

found the key to the mysteries of life in the development of

freedom, and Krause in the categories of being. But the one

scientific basis on which the true philosophy of history must rest

is the complete knowledge of the laws of human nature in all its

wants, its aspirations, its powers and its tendencies: and this

great truth, which Thucydides may be said in some measure to have

apprehended, was given to us first by Plato.

Now, it cannot be accurately said of this philosopher that either

his philosophy or his history is entirely and simply A PRIORI. ON

EST DE SON SIECLE MEME QUAND ON Y PROTESTE, and so we find in him

continual references to the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean

system, the general characteristics of Greek tyrannies and Greek

democracies. For while, in his account of the method of forming an

ideal state, he says that the political artist is indeed to fix his

gaze on the sun of abstract truth in the heavens of the pure

reason, but is sometimes to turn to the realisation of the ideals

on earth: yet, after all, the general character of the Platonic

method, which is what we are specially concerned with, is

essentially deductive and A PRIORI. And he himself, in the

building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a [Greek

text which cannot be reproduced], making a clean sweep of all

history and all experience; and it was essentially as an A PRIORI

theorist that he is criticised by Aristotle, as we shall see later.

To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme of the

laws of political revolutions as drawn out by Plato, we must first

note that the primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the

general principle, common to the vegetable and animal worlds as

well as to the world of history, that all created things are fated

to decay - a principle which, though expressed in the terms of a

mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet perhaps in its essence

scientific. For we too must hold that a continuous redistribution

of matter and motion is the inevitable result of the nominal

persistence of Force, and that perfect equilibrium is as impossible

in politics as it certainly is in physics.

The secondary causes which mar the perfection of the Platonic 'city

of the sun' are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race

consequent on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation

of physical achievements over mental culture; while the

hierarchical succession of Timocracy and Oligarchy, Democracy and

Tyranny, is dwelt on at great length and its causes analysed in a

very dramatic and psychological manner, if not in that sanctioned

by the actual order of history.

And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic

succession of states represents rather the succession of ideas in

the philosophic mind than any historical succession of time.

Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the

theory of the periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be

scientific, it must be universal, and so true of all the other

states as well as of the ideal. Besides, a state usually changes

into its contrary and not to the form next to it; so the ideal

state would not change into Timocracy; while Oligarchy, more often

than Tyranny, succeeds Democracy. Plato, besides, says nothing of

what a Tyranny would change to. According to the cycle theory it

ought to pass into the ideal state again, but as a fact one Tyranny

is changed into another as at Sicyon, or into a Democracy as at

Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at Carthage. The example of

Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often followed by a

Tyranny, as at Leontini and Gela. Besides, it is absurd to

represent greed as the chief motive of decay, or to talk of avarice

as the root of Oligarchy, when in nearly all true oligarchies

money-making is forbidden by law. And finally the Platonic theory

neglects the different kinds of democracies and of tyrannies.

Now nothing can be more important than this passage in Aristotle's

POLITICS (v. 12.), which may he said to mark an era in the

evolution of historical criticism. For there is nothing on which

Aristotle insists so strongly as that the generalisations from

facts ought to be added to the data of the A PRIORI method - a

principle which we know to be true not merely of deductive

speculative politics but of physics also: for are not the residual

phenomena of chemists a valuable source of improvement in theory?

His own method is essentially historical though by no means

empirical. On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly

styled IL MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO, may be said to have

apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively

empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of both

in the process called Analysis or the Interpretation of Facts,

which has been defined as the application to facts of such general

conceptions as may fix the important characteristics of the

phenomena, and present them permanently in their true relations.

He too was the first to point out, what even in our own day is

incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development of

man, is not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that

inconsistency and anomaly are as impossible in the moral as they

are in the physical world, and that where the superficial observer

thinks he sees a revolution the philosophical critic discerns

merely the gradual and rational evolution of the inevitable results

of certain antecedents.

And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the

philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that man,

to be apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as

in his natural powers, must be studied from below in the

hierarchical progression of higher function from the lower forms of

life. The important maxim, that to obtain a clear conception of

anything we must 'study it in its growth from the very beginning,'

is formally set down in the opening of the POLITICS, where, indeed,

we shall find the other characteristic features of the modern

Evolutionary theory, such as the 'Differentiation of Function' and

the 'Survival of the Fittest' explicitly set forth.

What a valuable step this was in the improvement of the method of

historical criticism it is needless to point out. By it, one may

say, the true thread was given to guide one's steps through the

bewildering labyrinth of facts. For history (to use terms with

which Aristotle has made us familiar) may be looked at from two

essentially different standpoints; either as a work of art whose

[Greek text which cannot be reproduced] or final cause is external

to it and imposed on it from without; or as an organism containing

the law of its own development in itself, and working out its

perfection merely by the fact of being what it is. Now, if we

adopt the former, which we may style the theological view, we shall

be in continual danger of tripping into the pitfall of some A

PRIORI conclusion - that bourne from which, it has been truly said,

no traveller ever returns.

The latter is the only scientific theory and was apprehended in its

fulness by Aristotle, whose application of the inductive method to

history, and whose employment of the evolutionary theory of

humanity, show that he was conscious that the philosophy of history

is nothing separate from the facts of history but is contained in

them, and that the rational law of the complex phenomena of life,

like the ideal in the world of thought, is to be reached through

the facts, not superimposed on them - [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced].

And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science of

historical criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his

attitude towards those two great difficulties in the formation of a

philosophy of history on which I have touched above. I mean the

assertion of extra-natural interference with the normal development

of the world and of the incalculable influence exercised by the

power of free will.

Now, as regards the former, he may be said to have neglected it

entirely. The special acts of providence proceeding from God's

immediate government of the world, which Herodotus saw as mighty

landmarks in history, would have been to him essentially disturbing

elements in that universal reign of law, the extent of whose

limitless empire he of all the great thinkers of antiquity was the

first explicitly to recognise.

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper

conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer

thought of God as of one with fair limbs and treacherous face

haunting wood and glade, nor would he see in him a jealous judge

continually interfering in the world's history to bring the wicked

to punishment and the proud to a fall. God to him was the

incarnation of the pure Intellect, a being whose activity was the

contemplation of his own perfection, one whom Philosophy might

imitate but whom prayers could never move, to the sublime

indifference of whose passionless wisdom what were the sons of men,

their desires or their sins? While, as regards the other

difficulty and the formation of a philosophy of history, the

conflict of free will with general laws appears first in Greek

thought in the usual theological form in which all great ideas seem

to be cradled at their birth.

It was such legends as those of OEdipus and Adrastus, exemplifying

the struggles of individual humanity against the overpowering force

of circumstances and necessity, which gave to the early Greeks

those same lessons which we of modern days draw, in somewhat less

artistic fashion, from the study of statistics and the laws of

physiology.

In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural

influence. The Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and

then punishment, are no longer 'viper-tressed goddesses with eyes

and mouth aflame,' but those evil thoughts which harbour within the

impure soul. In this, as in all other points, to arrive at

Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere of scientific and modern

thought.

But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as

essentially a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of life, he was fully conscious

of the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of

force beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is

inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which

is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education and

circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good

and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the

one is morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated

for reformation.

And of the influence of climate and temperature in forming the

nature of man (a conception perhaps pressed too far in modern days

when the 'race theory' is supposed to be a sufficient explanation

of the Hindoo, and the latitude and longitude of a country the best

guide to its morals(6)) Aristotle is completely unaware. I do not

allude to such smaller points as the oligarchical tendencies of a

horse-breeding country and the democratic influence of the

proximity of the sea (important though they are for the

consideration of Greek history), but rather to those wider views in

the seventh book of his POLITICS, where he attributes the happy

union in the Greek character of intellectual attainments with the

spirit of progress to the temperate climate they enjoyed, and

points out how the extreme cold of the north dulls the mental

faculties of its inhabitants and renders them incapable of social

organisation or extended empire; while to the enervating heat of

eastern countries was due that want of spirit and bravery which

then, as now, was the characteristic of the population in that

quarter of the globe.

Thucydides has shown the causal connection between political

revolutions and the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther

and points out the psychological influences on a people's character

exercised by the various extremes of climate - in both cases the

first appearance of a most valuable form of historical criticism.

To the development of Dialectic, as to God, intervals of time are

of no account. From Plato and Aristotle we pass direct to

Polybius.

The progress of thought from the philosopher of the Academe to the

Arcadian historian may be best illustrated by a comparison of the

method by which each of the three writers, whom I have selected as

the highest expression of the rationalism of his respective age,

attained to his ideal state: for the latter conception may be in a

measure regarded as representing the most spiritual principle which

they could discern in history.

Now, Plato created his on A PRIORI principles; Aristotle formed his

by an analysis of existing constitutions; Polybius found his

realised for him in the actual world of fact. Aristotle criticised

the deductive speculations of Plato by means of inductive negative

instances, but Polybius will not take the 'Cloud City' of the

REPUBLIC into account at all. He compares it to an athlete who has

never run on 'Constitution Hill,' to a statue so beautiful that it

is entirely removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity, and

consequently from the canons of criticism.

The Roman state had attained in his eyes, by means of the mutual

counteraction of three opposing forces, (7) that stable equilibrium

in politics which was the ideal of all the theoretical writers of

antiquity. And in connection with this point it will be convenient

to notice here how much truth there is contained in the accusation

often brought against the ancients that they knew nothing of the

idea of Progress, for the meaning of many of their speculations

will be hidden from us if we do not try and comprehend first what

their aim was, and secondly why it was so.

Now, like all wide generalities, this statement is at least

inaccurate. The prayer of Plato's ideal City - [Greek text which

cannot be reproduced], might be written as a text over the door of

the last Temple to Humanity raised by the disciples of Fourier and

Saint-Simon, but it is certainly true that their ideal principle

was order and permanence, not indefinite progress. For, setting

aside the artistic prejudices which would have led the Greeks to

reject this idea of unlimited improvement, we may note that the

modern conception of progress rests partly on the new enthusiasm

and worship of humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of material

improvements in civilisation which applied science has held out to

us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought seems to have

been strangely free. For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of

the great men whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity

and its supernatural powers; while their science was eminently

speculative and often almost mystic in its character, aiming at

culture and not utility, at higher spirituality and more intense

reverence for law, rather than at the increased facilities of

locomotion and the cheap production of common things about which

our modern scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and

perhaps chiefly, we must remember that the 'plague spot of all

Greek states,' as one of their own writers has called it, was the

terrible insecurity to life and property which resulted from the

factions and revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece at all

times, raising a spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in

the middle ages of Europe.

These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how

it was that, radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek

political theorists were, yet, their end once attained, no modern

conservatives raised such outcry against the slightest innovation.

Even acknowledged improvements in such things as the games of

children or the modes of music were regarded by them with feelings

of extreme apprehension as the herald of the DRAPEAU ROUGE of

reform. And secondly, it will show us how it was that Polybius

found his ideal in the commonwealth of Rome, and Aristotle, like

Mr. Bright, in the middle classes. Polybius, however, is not

content merely with pointing out his ideal state, but enters at

considerable length into the question of those general laws whose

consideration forms the chief essential of the philosophy of

history.

He starts by accepting the general principle that all things are

fated to decay (which I noticed in the case of Plato), and that 'as

iron produces rust and as wood breeds the animals that destroy it,

so every state has in it the seeds of its own corruption.' He is

not, however, content to rest there, but proceeds to deal with the

more immediate causes of revolutions, which he says are twofold in

nature, either external or internal. Now, the former, depending as

they do on the synchronous conjunction of other events outside the

sphere of scientific estimation, are from their very character

incalculable; but the latter, though assuming many forms, always

result from the over-great preponderance of any single element to

the detriment of the others, the rational law lying at the base of

all varieties of political changes being that stability can result

only from the statical equilibrium produced by the counteraction of

opposing parts, since the more simple a constitution is the more it

is insecure. Plato had pointed out before how the extreme liberty

of a democracy always resulted in despotism, but Polybius analyses

the law and shows the scientific principles on which it rests.

The doctrine of the instability of pure constitutions forms an

important era in the philosophy of history. Its special

applicability to the politics of our own day has been illustrated

in the rise of the great Napoleon, when the French state had lost

those divisions of caste and prejudice, of landed aristocracy and

moneyed interest, institutions in which the vulgar see only

barriers to Liberty but which are indeed the only possible defences

against the coming of that periodic Sirius of politics, the [Greek

text which cannot be reproduced].

There is a principle which Tocqueville never wearies of explaining,

and which has been subsumed by Mr. Herbert Spencer under that

general law common to all organic bodies which we call the

Instability of the Homogeneous. The various manifestations of this

law, as shown in the normal, regular revolutions and evolutions of

the different forms of government, (8) are expounded with great

clearness by Polybius, who claimed for his theory, in the

Thucydidean spirit, that it is a [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced], not a mere [Greek text which cannot be reproduced],

and that a knowledge of it will enable the impartial observer (9)

to discover at any time what period of its constitutional evolution

any particular state has already reached and into what form it will

be next differentiated, though possibly the exact time of the

changes may be more or less uncertain. (10)

Now in this necessarily incomplete account of the laws of political

revolutions as expounded by Polybius enough perhaps has been said

to show what is his true position in the rational development of

the 'Idea' which I have called the Philosophy of History, because

it is the unifying of history. Seen darkly as it is through the

glass of religion in the pages of Herodotus, more metaphysical than

scientific with Thucydides, Plato strove to seize it by the eagle-

flight of speculation, to reach it with the eager grasp of a soul

impatient of those slower and surer inductive methods which

Aristotle, in his trenchant criticism of his greater master, showed

were more brilliant than any vague theory, if the test of

brilliancy is truth.

What then is the position of Polybius? Does any new method remain

for him? Polybius was one of those many men who are born too late

to be original. To Thucydides belongs the honour of being the

first in the history of Greek thought to discern the supreme calm

of law and order underlying the fitful storms of life, and Plato

and Aristotle each represents a great new principle. To Polybius

belongs the office - how noble an office he made it his writings

show - of making more explicit the ideas which were implicit in his

predecessors, of showing that they were of wider applicability and

perhaps of deeper meaning than they had seemed before, of examining

with more minuteness the laws which they had discovered, and

finally of pointing out more clearly than any one had done the

range of science and the means it offered for analysing the present

and predicting what was to come. His office thus was to gather up

what they had left, to give their principles new life by a wider

application.

Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought. When the

Philosophy of history appears next, as in Plutarch's tract on 'Why

God's anger is delayed,' the pendulum of thought had swung back to

where it began. His theory was introduced to the Romans under the

cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed by them as the

philosophical panegyric of their state. The last notice of it in

Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the

stable polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier

to commend than to produce and in no case lasting. Yet Polybius

had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the

rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy

fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian household

over the birth of that boy who, born to power as the champion of

the people, died wearing the purple of a king.

No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the

means by which the ancients attained to the philosophy of history.

The principle of heredity can be exemplified in literature as well

as in organic life: Aristotle, Plato and Polybius are the lineal

ancestors of Fichte and Hegel, of Vico and Cousin, of Montesquieu

and Tocqueville.

As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out

those great thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of

this spirit of historical criticism, I shall pass over those

annalists and chroniclers who intervened between Thucydides and

Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve to throw new light on the real

nature of this spirit and its intimate connection with all other

forms of advanced thought if I give some estimate of the character

and rise of those many influences prejudicial to the scientific

study of history which cause such a wide gap between these two

historians.

Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the

Isocratean school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena

for the display either of pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific

investigation into laws.

The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive

attention to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne,

prefer music to meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the

later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained

gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history. The

rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to

the aesthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more

than one metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and

historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but

by the goodness of the Greek they write.

I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by

Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more

accurate research of geography, the very splendour of his

achievements seems to have brought history again into the sphere of

romance. The appearance of all great men in the world is followed

invariably by the rise of that mythopoeic spirit and that tendency

to look for the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical

criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a

Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting conditions of

rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not very long ago.

While the founding of that city of Alexandria, in which Western and

Eastern thought met with such strange result to both, diverted the

critical tendencies of the Greek spirit into questions of grammar,

philology and the like, the narrow, artificial atmosphere of that

University town (as we may call it) was fatal to the development of

that independent and speculative spirit of research which strikes

out new methods of inquiry, of which historical criticism is one.

The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an

ignorance of the true principles of research, an enthusiastic

spirit for accumulating materials with a wonderful incapacity to

use them. Not among the hot sands of Egypt, or the Sophists of

Athens, but from the very heart of Greece rises the man of genius

on whose influence in the evolution of the philosophy of history I

have a short time ago dwelt. Born in the serene and pure air of

the clear uplands of Arcadia, Polybius may be said to reproduce in

his work the character of the place which gave him birth. For, of

all the historians - I do not say of antiquity but of all time -

none is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief

in the 'visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling

superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural' ([Greek

text that cannot be reproduced](11)) which he himself is compelled

to notice as the characteristics of some of the historians who

preceded him. Fortunate in the land which bore him, he was no less

blessed in the wondrous time of his birth. For, representing in

himself the spiritual supremacy of the Greek intellect and allied

in bonds of chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror of his

day, he seems led as it were by the hand of Fate 'to comprehend,'

as has been said, 'more clearly than the Romans themselves the

historical position of Rome,' and to discern with greater insight

than all other men could those two great resultants of ancient

civilisation, the material empire of the city of the seven hills,

and the intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.

Before his own day, he says, (12) the events of the world were

unconnected and separate and the histories confined to particular

countries. Now, for the first time the universal empire of the

Romans rendered a universal history possible. (13) This, then, is

the august motive of his work: to trace the gradual rise of this

Italian city from the day when the first legion crossed the narrow

strait of Messina and landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the

time when Corinth in the East and Carthage in the West fell before

the resistless wave of empire and the eagles of Rome passed on the

wings of universal victory from Calpe and the Pillars of Hercules

to Syria and the Nile. At the same time he recognised that the

scheme of Rome's empire was worked out under the aegis of God's

will. (14) For, as one of the Middle Age scribes most truly says,

the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of Polybius is that

power which we Christians call God; the second aim, as one may call

it, of his history is to point out the rational and human and

natural causes which brought this result, distinguishing, as we

should say, between God's mediate and immediate government of the

world.

With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of

Man, he will have nothing to do: still less with any idea of

chance as a factor in the phenomena of life. Chance and miracles,

he says, are mere expressions for our ignorance of rational causes.

The spirit of rationalism which we recognised in Herodotus as a

vague uncertain attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a

consistent attitude of mind never argued about or even explained,

is by Polybius analysed and formulated as the great instrument of

historical research.

Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural, yet

was sceptical at times. Thucydides simply ignored the

supernatural. He did not discuss it, but he annihilated it by

explaining history without it. Polybius enters at length into the

whole question and explains its origin and the method of treating

it. Herodotus would have believed in Scipio's dream. Thucydides

would have ignored it entirely. Polybius explains it. He is the

culmination of the rational progression of Dialectic. 'Nothing,'

he says, 'shows a foolish mind more than the attempt to account for

any phenomena on the principle of chance or supernatural

intervention. History is a search for rational causes, and there

is nothing in the world - even those phenomena which seem to us the

most remote from law and improbable - which is not the logical and

inevitable result of certain rational antecedents.'

Some things, of course, are to be rejected A PRIORI without

entering into the subject: 'As regards such miracles,' he says,

(15) 'as that on a certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never

falls though the statue stands in the open air, or that those who

enter God's shrine in Arcadia lose their natural shadows, I cannot

really be expected to argue upon the subject. For these things are

not only utterly improbable but absolutely impossible.'

'For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain

a task as trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit

the possibility of the supernatural, which is the very point at

issue.'

What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle

is to annihilate the possibility of history: for just as

scientific and chemical experiments would be either impossible or

useless if exposed to the chance of continued interference on the

part of some foreign body, so the laws and principles which govern

history, the causes of phenomena, the evolution of progress, the

whole science, in a word, of man's dealings with his own race and

with nature, will remain a sealed book to him who admits the

possibility of extra-natural interference.

The stories of miracles, then, are to be rejected on A PRIORI

rational grounds, but in the case of events which we know to have

happened the scientific historian will not rest till he has

discovered their natural causes which, for instance, in the case of

the wonderful rise of the Roman Empire - the most marvellous thing,

Polybius says, which God ever brought about (16) - are to be found

in the excellence of their constitution ([Greek text which cannot

be reproduced]), the wisdom of their advisers, their splendid

military arrangements, and their superstition ([Greek text which

cannot be reproduced]). For while Polybius regarded the revealed

religion as, of course, objective reality of truth, (17) he laid

great stress on its moral subjective influence, going, in one

passage on the subject, even so far as almost to excuse the

introduction of the supernatural in very small quantities into

history on account of the extremely good effect it would have on

pious people.

But perhaps there is no passage in the whole of ancient and modern

history which breathes such a manly and splendid spirit of

rationalism as one preserved to us in the Vatican - strange

resting-place for it! - in which he treats of the terrible decay of

population which had fallen on his native land in his own day, and

which by the general orthodox public was regarded as a special

judgment of God sending childlessness on women as a punishment for

the sins of the people. For it was a disaster quite without

parallel in the history of the land, and entirely unforeseen by any

of its political-economy writers who, on the contrary, were always

anticipating that danger would arise from an excess of population

overrunning its means of subsistence, and becoming unmanageable

through its size. Polybius, however, will have nothing to do with

either priest or worker of miracles in this matter. He will not

even seek that 'sacred Heart of Greece,' Delphi, Apollo's shrine,

whose inspiration even Thucydides admitted and before whose wisdom

Socrates bowed. How foolish, he says, were the man who on this

matter would pray to God. We must search for the rational causes,

and the causes are seen to be clear, and the method of prevention

also. He then proceeds to notice how all this arose from the

general reluctance to marriage and to bearing the expense of

educating a large family which resulted from the carelessness and

avarice of the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational

principles the whole of this apparently supernatural judgment.

Now, it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles

as violation of inviolable laws is entirely A PRIORI - for

discussion of such a matter is, of course, impossible for a

rational thinker - yet his rejection of supernatural intervention

rests entirely on the scientific grounds of the necessity of

looking for natural causes. And he is quite logical in maintaining

his position on these principles. For, where it is either

difficult or impossible to assign any rational cause for phenomena,

or to discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in the

alternative of admitting some extra-natural interference which his

essentially scientific method of treating the matter has logically

forced on him, approving, for instance, of prayers for rain, on the

express ground that the laws of meteorology had not yet been

ascertained. He would, of course, have been the first to welcome

our modern discoveries in the matter. The passage in question is

in every way one of the most interesting in his whole work, not, of

course, as signifying any inclination on his part to acquiesce in

the supernatural, but because it shows how essentially logical and

rational his method of argument was, and how candid and fair his

mind.

Having now examined Polybius's attitude towards the supernatural

and the general ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to

examine the method he pursued in his scientific investigation of

the complex phenomena of life. For, as I have said before in the

course of this essay, what is important in all great writers is not

so much the results they arrive at as the methods they pursue. The

increased knowledge of facts may alter any conclusion in history as

in physical science, and the canons of speculative historical

credibility must be acknowledged to appeal rather to that

subjective attitude of mind which we call the historic sense than

to any formulated objective rules. But a scientific method is a

gain for all time, and the true if not the only progress of

historical criticism consists in the improvement of the instruments

of research.

Now first, as regards his conception of history, I have already

pointed out that it was to him essentially a search for causes, a

problem to be solved, not a picture to be painted, a scientific

investigation into laws and tendencies, not a mere romantic account

of startling incident and wondrous adventure. Thucydides, in the

opening of his great work, had sounded the first note of the

scientific conception of history. 'The absence of romance in my

pages,' he says, 'will, I fear, detract somewhat from its value,

but I have written my work not to be the exploit of a passing hour

but as the possession of all time.' (18) Polybius follows with

words almost entirely similar. If, he says, we banish from history

the consideration of causes, methods and motives ([Greek text which

cannot be reproduced]), and refuse to consider how far the result

of anything is its rational consequent, what is left is a mere

[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], not a [Greek text which

cannot be reproduced], an oratorical essay which may give pleasure

for the moment, but which is entirely without any scientific value

for the explanation of the future. Elsewhere he says that 'history

robbed of the exposition of its causes and laws is a profitless

thing, though it may allure a fool.' And all through his history

the same point is put forward and exemplified in every fashion.

So far for the conception of history. Now for the groundwork. As

regards the character of the phenomena to be selected by the

scientific investigator, Aristotle had laid down the general

formula that nature should be studied in her normal manifestations.

Polybius, true to his character of applying explicitly the

principles implicit in the work of others, follows out the doctrine

of Aristotle, and lays particular stress on the rational and

undisturbed character of the development of the Roman constitution

as affording special facilities for the discovery of the laws of

its progress. Political revolutions result from causes either

external or internal. The former are mere disturbing forces which

lie outside the sphere of scientific calculation. It is the latter

which are important for the establishing of principles and the

elucidation of the sequences of rational evolution.

He thus may be said to have anticipated one of the most important

truths of the modern methods of investigation: I mean that

principle which lays down that just as the study of physiology

should precede the study of pathology, just as the laws of disease

are best discovered by the phenomena presented in health, so the

method of arriving at all great social and political truths is by

the investigation of those cases where development has been normal,

rational and undisturbed.

The critical canon that the more a people has been interfered with,

the more difficult it becomes to generalise the laws of its

progress and to analyse the separate forces of its civilisation, is

one the validity of which is now generally recognised by those who

pretend to a scientific treatment of all history: and while we

have seen that Aristotle anticipated it in a general formula, to

Polybius belongs the honour of being the first to apply it

explicitly in the sphere of history.

I have shown how to this great scientific historian the motive of

his work was essentially the search for causes; and true to his

analytical spirit he is careful to examine what a cause really is

and in what part of the antecedents of any consequent it is to be

looked for. To give an illustration: As regards the origin of the

war with Perseus, some assigned as causes the expulsion of

Abrupolis by Perseus, the expedition of the latter to Delphi, the

plot against Eumenes and the seizure of the ambassadors in Boeotia;

of these incidents the two former, Polybius points out, were merely

the pretexts, the two latter merely the occasions of the war. The

war was really a legacy left to Perseus by his father, who was

determined to fight it out with Rome. (19)

Here as elsewhere he is not originating any new idea. Thucydides

had pointed out the difference between the real and the alleged

cause, and the Aristotelian dictum about revolutions, [Greek text

which cannot be reproduced], draws the distinction between cause

and occasion with the brilliancy of an epigram. But the explicit

and rational investigation of the difference between [Greek text

which cannot be reproduced], and [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced] was reserved for Polybius. No canon of historical

criticism can be said to be of more real value than that involved

in this distinction, and the overlooking of it has filled our

histories with the contemptible accounts of the intrigues of

courtiers and of kings and the petty plottings of backstairs

influence - particulars interesting, no doubt, to those who would

ascribe the Reformation to Anne Boleyn's pretty face, the Persian

war to the influence of a doctor or a curtain-lecture from Atossa,

or the French Revolution to Madame de Maintenon, but without any

value for those who aim at any scientific treatment of history.

But the question of method, to which I am compelled always to

return, is not yet exhausted. There is another aspect in which it

may be regarded, and I shall now proceed to treat of it.

One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian

has to contend is the enormous complexity of the facts which come

under his notice: D'Alembert's suggestion that at the end of every

century a selection of facts should be made and the rest burned (if

it was really intended seriously) could not, of course, be

entertained for a moment. A problem loses all its value when it

becomes simplified, and the world would be all the poorer if the

Sibyl of History burned her volumes. Besides, as Gibbon pointed

out, 'a Montesquieu will detect in the most insignificant fact

relations which the vulgar overlook.'

Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the

particular elements, which he desires to examine, from disturbing

and extraneous causes, as the experimental chemist can do (though

sometimes, as in the case of lunatic asylums and prisons, he is

enabled to observe phenomena in a certain degree of isolation). So

he is compelled either to use the deductive mode of arguing from

general laws or to employ the method of abstraction, which gives a

fictitious isolation to phenomena never so isolated in actual

existence. And this is exactly what Polybius has done as well as

Thucydides. For, as has been well remarked, there is in the works

of these two writers a certain plastic unity of type and motive;

whatever they write is penetrated through and through with a

specific quality, a singleness and concentration of purpose, which

we may contrast with the more comprehensive width as manifested not

merely in the modern mind, but also in Herodotus. Thucydides,

regarding society as influenced entirely by political motives, took

no account of forces of a different nature, and consequently his

results, like those of most modern political economists, have to be

modified largely (20) before they come to correspond with what we

know was the actual state of fact. Similarly, Polybius will deal

only with those forces which tended to bring the civilised world

under the dominion of Rome (ix. 1), and in the Thucydidean spirit

points out the want of picturesqueness and romance in his pages

which is the result of the abstract method ([Greek text which

cannot be reproduced]) being careful also to tell us that his

rejection of all other forces is essentially deliberate and the

result of a preconceived theory and by no means due to carelessness

of any kind.

Now, of the general value of the abstract method and the legality

of its employment in the sphere of history, this is perhaps not the

suitable occasion for any discussion. It is, however, in all ways

worthy of note that Polybius is not merely conscious of, but dwells

with particular weight on, the fact which is usually urged as the

strongest objection to the employment of the abstract method - I

mean the conception of a society as a sort of human organism whose

parts are indissolubly connected with one another and all affected

when one member is in any way agitated. This conception of the

organic nature of society appears first in Plato and Aristotle, who

apply it to cities. Polybius, as his wont is, expands it to be a

general characteristic of all history. It is an idea of the very

highest importance, especially to a man like Polybius whose

thoughts are continually turned towards the essential unity of

history and the impossibility of isolation.

Farther, as regards the particular method of investigating that

group of phenomena obtained for him by the abstract method, he will

adopt, he tells us, neither the purely deductive nor the purely

inductive mode but the union of both. In other words, he formally

adopts that method of analysis upon the importance of which I have

dwelt before.

And lastly, while, without doubt, enormous simplicity in the

elements under consideration is the result of the employment of the

abstract method, even within the limit thus obtained a certain

selection must be made, and a selection involves a theory. For the

facts of life cannot be tabulated with as great an ease as the

colours of birds and insects can be tabulated. Now, Polybius

points out that those phenomena particularly are to be dwelt on

which may serve as a [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] or

sample, and show the character of the tendencies of the age as

clearly as 'a single drop from a full cask will be enough to

disclose the nature of the whole contents.' This recognition of

the importance of single facts, not in themselves but because of

the spirit they represent, is extremely scientific; for we know

that from the single bone, or tooth even, the anatomist can

recreate entirely the skeleton of the primeval horse, and the

botanist tell the character of the flora and fauna of a district

from a single specimen.

Regarding truth as 'the most divine thing in Nature,' the very 'eye

and light of history without which it moves a blind thing,'

Polybius spared no pains in the acquisition of historical materials

or in the study of the sciences of politics and war, which he

considered were so essential to the training of the scientific

historian, and the labour he took is mirrored in the many ways in

which he criticises other authorities.

There is something, as a rule, slightly contemptible about ancient

criticism. The modern idea of the critic as the interpreter, the

expounder of the beauty and excellence of the work he selects,

seems quite unknown. Nothing can be more captious or unfair, for

instance, than the method by which Aristotle criticised the ideal

state of Plato in his ethical works, and the passages quoted by

Polybius from Timaeus show that the latter historian fully deserved

the punning name given to him. But in Polybius there is, I think,

little of that bitterness and pettiness of spirit which

characterises most other writers, and an incidental story he tells

of his relations with one of the historians whom he criticised

shows that he was a man of great courtesy and refinement of taste -

as, indeed, befitted one who had lived always in the society of

those who were of great and noble birth.

Now, as regards the character of the canons by which he criticises

the works of other authors, in the majority of cases he employs

simply his own geographical and military knowledge, showing, for

instance, the impossibility in the accounts given of Nabis's march

from Sparta simply by his acquaintance with the spots in question;

or the inconsistency of those of the battle of Issus; or of the

accounts given by Ephorus of the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea.

In the latter case he says, if any one will take the trouble to

measure out the ground of the site of the battle and then test the

manoeuvres given, he will find how inaccurate the accounts are.

In other cases he appeals to public documents, the importance of

which he was always foremost in recognising; showing, for instance,

by a document in the public archives of Rhodes how inaccurate were

the accounts given of the battle of Lade by Zeno and Antisthenes.

Or he appeals to psychological probability, rejecting, for

instance, the scandalous stories told of Philip of Macedon, simply

from the king's general greatness of character, and arguing that a

boy so well educated and so respectably connected as Demochares

(xii. 14) could never have been guilty of that of which evil rumour

accused him.

But the chief object of his literary censure is Timaeus, who had

been unsparing of his strictures on others. The general point

which he makes against him, impugning his accuracy as a historian,

is that he derived his knowledge of history not from the dangerous

perils of a life of action but in the secure indolence of a narrow

scholastic life. There is, indeed, no point on which he is so

vehement as this. 'A history,' he says, 'written in a library

gives as lifeless and as inaccurate a picture of history as a

painting which is copied not from a living animal but from a

stuffed one.'

There is more difference, he says in another place, between the

history of an eye-witness and that of one whose knowledge comes

from books, than there is between the scenes of real life and the

fictitious landscapes of theatrical scenery. Besides this, he

enters into somewhat elaborate detailed criticism of passages where

he thought Timaeus was following a wrong method and perverting

truth, passages which it will be worth while to examine in detail.

Timaeus, from the fact of there being a Roman custom to shoot a

war-horse on a stated day, argued back to the Trojan origin of that

people. Polybius, on the other hand, points out that the inference

is quite unwarrantable, because horse-sacrifices are ordinary

institutions common to all barbarous tribes. Timaeus here, as was

common with Greek writers, is arguing back from some custom of the

present to an historical event in the past. Polybius really is

employing the comparative method, showing how the custom was an

ordinary step in the civilisation of every early people.

In another place, (21) he shows how illogical is the scepticism of

Timaeus as regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by

appealing to the statue of the Bull, which was still to be seen in

Carthage; pointing out how impossible it was, on any other theory

except that it belonged to Phalaris, to account for the presence in

Carthage of a bull of this peculiar character with a door between

his shoulders. But one of the great points which he uses against

this Sicilian historian is in reference to the question of the

origin of the Locrian colony. In accordance with the received

tradition on the subject, Aristotle had represented the Locrian

colony as founded by some Parthenidae or slaves' children, as they

were called, a statement which seems to have roused the indignation

of Timaeus, who went to a good deal of trouble to confute this

theory. He does so on the following grounds:-

First of all, he points out that in the ancient days the Greeks had

no slaves at all, so the mention of them in the matter is an

anachronism; and next he declares that he was shown in the Greek

city of Locris certain ancient inscriptions in which their relation

to the Italian city was expressed in terms of the position between

parent and child, which showed also that mutual rights of

citizenship were accorded to each city. Besides this, he appeals

to various questions of improbability as regards their

international relationship, on which Polybius takes diametrically

opposite grounds which hardly call for discussion. And in favour

of his own view he urges two points more: first, that the

Lacedaemonians being allowed furlough for the purpose of seeing

their wives at home, it was unlikely that the Locrians should not

have had the same privilege; and next, that the Italian Locrians

knew nothing of the Aristotelian version and had, on the contrary,

very severe laws against adulterers, runaway slaves and the like.

Now, most of these questions rest on mere probability, which is

always such a subjective canon that an appeal to it is rarely

conclusive. I would note, however, as regards the inscriptions

which, if genuine, would of course have settled the matter, that

Polybius looks on them as a mere invention on the part of Timaeus,

who, he remarks, gives no details about them, though, as a rule, he

is over-anxious to give chapter and verse for everything. A

somewhat more interesting point is that where he attacks Timaeus

for the introduction of fictitious speeches into his narrative; for

on this point Polybius seems to be far in advance of the opinions

held by literary men on the subject not merely in his own day, but

for centuries after.

Herodotus had introduced speeches avowedly dramatic and fictitious.

Thucydides states clearly that, where he was unable to find out

what people really said, he put down what they ought to have said.

Sallust alludes, it is true, to the fact of the speech he puts into

the mouth of the tribune Memmius being essentially genuine, but the

speeches given in the senate on the occasion of the Catilinarian

conspiracy are very different from the same orations as they appear

in Cicero. Livy makes his ancient Romans wrangle and chop logic

with all the subtlety of a Hortensius or a Scaevola. And even in

later days, when shorthand reporters attended the debates of the

senate and a DAILY NEWS was published in Rome, we find that one of

the most celebrated speeches in Tacitus (that in which the Emperor

Claudius gives the Gauls their freedom) is shown, by an inscription

discovered recently at Lugdunum, to be entirely fabulous.

Upon the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these speeches

were not intended to deceive; they were regarded merely as a

certain dramatic element which it was allowable to introduce into

history for the purpose of giving more life and reality to the

narration, and were to be criticised, not as we should, by arguing

how in an age before shorthand was known such a report was possible

or how, in the failure of written documents, tradition could bring

down such an accurate verbal account, but by the higher test of

their psychological probability as regards the persons in whose

mouths they are placed. An ancient historian in answer to modern

criticism would say, probably, that these fictitious speeches were

in reality more truthful than the actual ones, just as Aristotle

claimed for poetry a higher degree of truth in comparison to

history. The whole point is interesting as showing how far in

advance of his age Polybius may be said to have been.

The last scientific historian, it is possible to gather from his

writings what he considered were the characteristics of the ideal

writer of history; and no small light will be thrown on the

progress of historical criticism if we strive to collect and

analyse what in Polybius are more or less scattered expressions.

The ideal historian must be contemporary with the events he

describes, or removed from them by one generation only. Where it

is possible, he is to be an eye-witness of what he writes of; where

that is out of his power he is to test all traditions and stories

carefully and not to be ready to accept what is plausible in place

of what is true. He is to be no bookworm living aloof from the

experiences of the world in the artificial isolation of a

university town, but a politician, a soldier, and a traveller, a

man not merely of thought but of action, one who can do great

things as well as write of them, who in the sphere of history could

be what Byron and AEschylus were in the sphere of poetry, at once

LE CHANTRE ET LE HEROS.

He is to keep before his eyes the fact that chance is merely a

synonym for our ignorance; that the reign of law pervades the

domain of history as much as it does that of political science. He

is to accustom himself to look on all occasions for rational and

natural causes. And while he is to recognise the practical utility

of the supernatural, in an educational point of view, he is not

himself to indulge in such intellectual beating of the air as to

admit the possibility of the violation of inviolable laws, or to

argue in a sphere wherein argument is A PRIORI annihilated. He is

to be free from all bias towards friend and country; he is to be

courteous and gentle in criticism; he is not to regard history as a

mere opportunity for splendid and tragic writing; nor is he to

falsify truth for the sake of a paradox or an epigram.

While acknowledging the importance of particular facts as samples

of higher truths, he is to take a broad and general view of

humanity. He is to deal with the whole race and with the world,

not with particular tribes or separate countries. He is to bear in

mind that the world is really an organism wherein no one part can

be moved without the others being affected also. He is to

distinguish between cause and occasion, between the influence of

general laws and particular fancies, and he is to remember that the

greatest lessons of the world are contained in history and that it

is the historian's duty to manifest them so as to save nations from

following those unwise policies which always lead to dishonour and

ruin, and to teach individuals to apprehend by the intellectual

culture of history those truths which else they would have to learn

in the bitter school of experience,

Now, as regards his theory of the necessity of the historian's

being contemporary with the events he describes, so far as the

historian is a mere narrator the remark is undoubtedly true. But

to appreciate the harmony and rational position of the facts of a

great epoch, to discover its laws, the causes which produced it and

the effects which it generates, the scene must be viewed from a

certain height and distance to be completely apprehended. A

thoroughly contemporary historian such as Lord Clarendon or

Thucydides is in reality part of the history he criticises; and, in

the case of such contemporary historians as Fabius and Philistus,

Polybius in compelled to acknowledge that they are misled by

patriotic and other considerations. Against Polybius himself no

such accusation can be made. He indeed of all men is able, as from

some lofty tower, to discern the whole tendency of the ancient

world, the triumph of Roman institutions and of Greek thought which

is the last message of the old world and, in a more spiritual

sense, has become the Gospel of the new.

One thing indeed he did not see, or if he saw it, he thought but

little of it - how from the East there was spreading over the

world, as a wave spreads, a spiritual inroad of new religions from

the time when the Pessinuntine mother of the gods, a shapeless mass

of stone, was brought to the eternal city by her holiest citizen,

to the day when the ship CASTOR AND POLLUX stood in at Puteoli, and

St. Paul turned his face towards martyrdom and victory at Rome.

Polybius was able to predict, from his knowledge of the causes of

revolutions and the tendencies of the various forms of governments,

the uprising of that democratic tone of thought which, as soon as a

seed is sown in the murder of the Gracchi and the exile of Marius,

culminated as all democratic movements do culminate, in the supreme

authority of one man, the lordship of the world under the world's

rightful lord, Caius Julius Caesar. This, indeed, he saw in no

uncertain way. But the turning of all men's hearts to the East,

the first glimmering of that splendid dawn which broke over the

hills of Galilee and flooded the earth like wine, was hidden from

his eyes.

There are many points in the description of the ideal historian

which one may compare to the picture which Plato has given us of

the ideal philosopher. They are both 'spectators of all time and

all existence.' Nothing is contemptible in their eyes, for all

things have a meaning, and they both walk in august reasonableness

before all men, conscious of the workings of God yet free from all

terror of mendicant priest or vagrant miracle-worker. But the

parallel ends here. For the one stands aloof from the world-storm

of sleet and hail, his eyes fixed on distant and sunlit heights,

loving knowledge for the sake of knowledge and wisdom for the joy

of wisdom, while the other is an eager actor in the world ever

seeking to apply his knowledge to useful things. Both equally

desire truth, but the one because of its utility, the other for its

beauty. The historian regards it as the rational principle of all

true history, and no more. To the other it comes as an all-

pervading and mystic enthusiasm, 'like the desire of strong wine,

the craving of ambition, the passionate love of what is beautiful.'

Still, though we miss in the historian those higher and more

spiritual qualities which the philosopher of the Academe alone of

all men possessed, we must not blind ourselves to the merits of

that great rationalist who seems to have anticipated the very

latest words of modern science. Nor yet is he to be regarded

merely in the narrow light in which he is estimated by most modern

critics, as the explicit champion of rationalism and nothing more.

For he is connected with another idea, the course of which is as

the course of that great river of his native Arcadia which,

springing from some arid and sun-bleached rock, gathers strength

and beauty as it flows till it reaches the asphodel meadows of

Olympia and the light and laughter of Ionian waters.

For in him we can discern the first notes of that great cult of the

seven-hilled city which made Virgil write his epic and Livy his

history, which found in Dante its highest exponent, which dreamed

of an Empire where the Emperor would care for the bodies and the

Pope for the souls of men, and so has passed into the conception of

God's spiritual empire and the universal brotherhood of man and

widened into the huge ocean of universal thought as the Peneus

loses itself in the sea.

Polybius is the last scientific historian of Greece. The writer

who seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer

of biographies only. I will not here touch on Plutarch's

employment of the inductive method as shown in his constant use of

inscription and statue, of public document and building and the

like, because it involves no new method. It is his attitude

towards miracles of which I desire to treat.

Plutarch is philosophic enough to see that in the sense of a

violation of the laws of nature a miracle is impossible. It is

absurd, he says, to imagine that the statue of a saint can speak,

and that an inanimate object not possessing the vocal organs should

be able to utter an articulate sound. Upon the other hand, he

protests against science imagining that, by explaining the natural

causes of things, it has explained away their transcendental

meaning. 'When the tears on the cheek of some holy statue have

been analysed into the moisture which certain temperatures produce

on wood and marble, it yet by no means follows that they were not a

sign of grief and mourning set there by God Himself.' When Lampon

saw in the prodigy of the one-horned ram the omen of the supreme

rule of Pericles, and when Anaxagoras showed that the abnormal

development was the rational resultant of the peculiar formation of

the skull, the dreamer and the man of science were both right; it

was the business of the latter to consider how the prodigy came

about, of the former to show why it was so formed and what it so

portended. The progression of thought is exemplified in all

particulars. Herodotus had a glimmering sense of the impossibility

of a violation of nature. Thucydides ignored the supernatural.

Polybius rationalised it. Plutarch raises it to its mystical

heights again, though he bases it on law. In a word, Plutarch felt

that while science brings the supernatural down to the natural, yet

ultimately all that is natural is really supernatural. To him, as

to many of our own day, religion was that transcendental attitude

of the mind which, contemplating a world resting on inviolable law,

is yet comforted and seeks to worship God not in the violation but

in the fulfilment of nature.

It may seem paradoxical to quote in connection with the priest of

Chaeronea such a pure rationalist as Mr. Herbert Spencer; yet when

we read as the last message of modern science that 'when the

equation of life has been reduced to its lowest terms the symbols

are symbols still,' mere signs, that is, of that unknown reality

which underlies all matter and all spirit, we may feel how over the

wide strait of centuries thought calls to thought and how Plutarch

has a higher position than is usually claimed for him in the

progress of the Greek intellect.

And, indeed, it seems that not merely the importance of Plutarch

himself but also that of the land of his birth in the evolution of

Greek civilisation has been passed over by modern critics. To us,

indeed, the bare rock to which the Parthenon serves as a crown, and

which lies between Colonus and Attica's violet hills, will always

be the holiest spot in the land of Greece: and Delphi will come

next, and then the meadows of Eurotas where that noble people lived

who represented in Hellenic thought the reaction of the law of duty

against the law of beauty, the opposition of conduct to culture.

Yet, as one stands on the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

of Cithaeron and looks out on the great double plain of Boeotia,

the enormous importance of the division of Hellas comes to one's

mind with great force. To the north are Orchomenus and the Minyan

treasure-house, seat of those merchant princes of Phoenicia who

brought to Greece the knowledge of letters and the art of working

in gold. Thebes is at our feet with the gloom of the terrible

legends of Greek tragedy still lingering about it, the birthplace

of Pindar, the nurse of Epaminondas and the Sacred Band.

And from out of the plain where 'Mars loved to dance,' rises the

Muses' haunt, Helicon, by whose silver streams Corinna and Hesiod

sang; while far away under the white aegis of those snow-capped

mountains lies Chaeronea and the Lion plain where with vain

chivalry the Greeks strove to check Macedon first and afterwards

Rome; Chaeronea, where in the Martinmas summer of Greek

civilisation Plutarch rose from the drear waste of a dying religion

as the aftermath rises when the mowers think they have left the

field bare.

Greek philosophy began and ended in scepticism: the first and the

last word of Greek history was Faith.

Splendid thus in its death, like winter sunsets, the Greek religion

passed away into the horror of night. For the Cimmerian darkness

was at hand, and when the schools of Athens were closed and the

statue of Athena broken, the Greek spirit passed from the gods and

the history of its own land to the subtleties of defining the

doctrine of the Trinity and the mystical attempts to bring Plato

into harmony with Christ and to reconcile Gethsemane and the Sermon

on the Mount with the Athenian prison and the discussion in the

woods of Colonus. The Greek spirit slept for wellnigh a thousand

years. When it woke again, like Antaeus it had gathered strength

from the earth where it lay; like Apollo it had lost none of its

divinity through its long servitude.

In the history of Roman thought we nowhere find any of those

characteristics of the Greek Illumination which I have pointed out

are the necessary concomitants of the rise of historical criticism.

The conservative respect for tradition which made the Roman people

delight in the ritual and formulas of law, and is as apparent in

their politics as in their religion, was fatal to any rise of that

spirit of revolt against authority the importance of which, as a

factor in intellectual progress, we have already seen.

The whitened tables of the Pontifices preserved carefully the

records of the eclipses and other atmospherical phenomena, and what

we call the art of verifying dates was known to them at an early

time; but there was no spontaneous rise of physical science to

suggest by its analogies of law and order a new method of research,

nor any natural springing up of the questioning spirit of

philosophy with its unification of all phenomena and all knowledge.

At the very time when the whole tide of Eastern superstition was

sweeping into the heart of the Capital the Senate banished the

Greek philosophers from Rome. And of the three systems which did

at length take some root in the city, those of Zeno and Epicurus

were used merely as the rule for the ordering of life, while the

dogmatic scepticism of Carneades, by its very principles,

annihilated the possibility of argument and encouraged a perfect

indifference to research.

Nor were the Romans ever fortunate enough like the Greeks to have

to face the incubus of any dogmatic system of legends and myths,

the immoralities and absurdities of which might excite a

revolutionary outbreak of sceptical criticism. For the Roman

religion became as it were crystallised and isolated from progress

at an early period of its evolution. Their gods remained mere

abstractions of commonplace virtues or uninteresting

personifications of the useful things of life. The old primitive

creed was indeed always upheld as a state institution on account of

the enormous facilities it offered for cheating in politics, but as

a spiritual system of belief it was unanimously rejected at a very

early period both by the common people and the educated classes,

for the sensible reason that it was so extremely dull. The former

took refuge in the mystic sensualities of the worship of Isis, the

latter in the Stoical rules of life. The Romans classified their

gods carefully in their order of precedence, analysed their

genealogies in the laborious spirit of modern heraldry, fenced them

round with a ritual as intricate as their law, but never quite

cared enough about them to believe in them. So it was of no

account with them when the philosophers announced that Minerva was

merely memory. She had never been much else. Nor did they protest

when Lucretius dared to say of Ceres and of Liber that they were

only the corn of the field and the fruit of the vine. For they had

never mourned for the daughter of Demeter in the asphodel meadows

of Sicily, nor traversed the glades of Cithaeron with fawn-skin and

with spear.

This brief sketch of the condition of Roman thought will serve to

prepare us for the almost total want of scientific historical

criticism which we shall discern in their literature, and has,

besides, afforded fresh corroboration of the conditions essential

to the rise of this spirit, and of the modes of thought which it

reflects and in which it is always to be found. Roman historical

composition had its origin in the pontifical college of

ecclesiastical lawyers, and preserved to its close the uncritical

spirit which characterised its fountain-head. It possessed from

the outset a most voluminous collection of the materials of

history, which, however, produced merely antiquarians, not

historians. It is so hard to use facts, so easy to accumulate

them.

Wearied of the dull monotony of the pontifical annals, which dwelt

on little else but the rise and fall in provisions and the eclipses

of the sun, Cato wrote out a history with his own hand for the

instruction of his child, to which he gave the name of Origines,

and before his time some aristocratic families had written

histories in Greek much in the same spirit in which the Germans of

the eighteenth century used French as the literary language. But

the first regular Roman historian is Sallust. Between the

extravagant eulogies passed on this author by the French (such as

De Closset), and Dr. Mommsen's view of him as merely a political

pamphleteer, it is perhaps difficult to reach the VIA MEDIA of

unbiassed appreciation. He has, at any rate, the credit of being a

purely rationalistic historian, perhaps the only one in Roman

literature. Cicero had a good many qualifications for a scientific

historian, and (as he usually did) thought very highly of his own

powers. On passages of ancient legend, however, he is rather

unsatisfactory, for while he is too sensible to believe them he is

too patriotic to reject them. And this is really the attitude of

Livy, who claims for early Roman legend a certain uncritical homage

from the rest of the subject world. His view in his history is

that it is not worth while to examine the truth of these stories.

In his hands the history of Rome unrolls before our eyes like some

gorgeous tapestry, where victory succeeds victory, where triumph

treads on the heels of triumph, and the line of heroes seems never

to end. It is not till we pass behind the canvas and see the

slight means by which the effect is produced that we apprehend the

fact that like most picturesque writers Livy is an indifferent

critic. As regards his attitude towards the credibility of early

Roman history he is quite as conscious as we are of its mythical

and unsound nature. He will not, for instance, decide whether the

Horatii were Albans or Romans; who was the first dictator; how many

tribunes there were, and the like. His method, as a rule, is

merely to mention all the accounts and sometimes to decide in

favour of the most probable, but usually not to decide at all. No

canons of historical criticism will ever discover whether the Roman

women interviewed the mother of Coriolanus of their own accord or

at the suggestion of the senate; whether Remus was killed for

jumping over his brother's wall or because they quarrelled about

birds; whether the ambassadors found Cincinnatus ploughing or only

mending a hedge. Livy suspends his judgment over these important

facts and history when questioned on their truth is dumb. If he

does select between two historians he chooses the one who is nearer

to the facts he describes. But he is no critic, only a

conscientious writer. It is mere vain waste to dwell on his

critical powers, for they do not exist.

In the case of Tacitus imagination has taken the place of history.

The past lives again in his pages, but through no laborious

criticism; rather through a dramatic and psychological faculty

which he specially possessed.

In the philosophy of history he has no belief. He can never make

up his mind what to believe as regards God's government of the

world. There is no method in him and none elsewhere in Roman

literature.

Nations may not have missions but they certainly have functions.

And the function of ancient Italy was not merely to give us what is

statical in our institutions and rational in our law, but to blend

into one elemental creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of

Semite. Italy was not a pioneer in intellectual progress, nor a

motive power in the evolution of thought. The owl of the goddess

of Wisdom traversed over the whole land and found nowhere a

resting-place. The dove, which is the bird of Christ, flew

straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began. It was the

fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediaeval costume

the soldiers who watched over the tomb of Christ, and this, which

was the result of the frank anachronism of all true art, may serve

to us as an allegory. For it was in vain that the Middle Ages

strove to guard the buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of

the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave-clothes

laid aside. Humanity had risen from the dead.

The study of Greek, it has been well said, implies the birth of

criticism, comparison and research. At the opening of that

education of modern by ancient thought which we call the

Renaissance, it was the words of Aristotle which sent Columbus

sailing to the New World, while a fragment of Pythagorean astronomy

set Copernicus thinking on that train of reasoning which has

revolutionised the whole position of our planet in the universe.

Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a return to

Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which obscured the pages

of Greek manuscripts were blotted out, the splendours of a new

method were unfolded to the world, and out of the melancholy sea of

mediaevalism rose the free spirit of man in all that splendour of

glad adolescence, when the bodily powers seem quickened by a new

vitality, when the eye sees more clearly than its wont and the mind

apprehends what was beforetime hidden from it. To herald the

opening of the sixteenth century, from the little Venetian printing

press came forth all the great authors of antiquity, each bearing

on the title-page the words [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced]; words which may serve to remind us with what wondrous

prescience Polybius saw the world's fate when he foretold the

material sovereignty of Roman institutions and exemplified in

himself the intellectual empire of Greece.

The course of the study of the spirit of historical criticism has

not been a profitless investigation into modes and forms of thought

now antiquated and of no account. The only spirit which is

entirely removed from us is the mediaeval; the Greek spirit is

essentially modern. The introduction of the comparative method of

research which has forced history to disclose its secrets belongs

in a measure to us. Ours, too, is a more scientific knowledge of

philology and the method of survival. Nor did the ancients know

anything of the doctrine of averages or of crucial instances, both

of which methods have proved of such importance in modern

criticism, the one adding a most important proof of the statical

elements of history, and exemplifying the influences of all

physical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the

single instance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a

whole new science of prehistoric archaeology and to bring us back

to a time when man was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and

the woolly rhinoceros. But, except these, we have added no new

canon or method to the science of historical criticism. Across the

drear waste of a thousand years the Greek and the modern spirit

join hands.

In the torch race which the Greek boys ran from the Cerameician

field of death to the home of the goddess of Wisdom, not merely he

who first reached the goal but he also who first started with the

torch aflame received a prize. In the Lampadephoria of

civilisation and free thought let us not forget to render due meed

of honour to those who first lit that sacred flame, the increasing

splendour of which lights our footsteps to the far-off divine event

of the attainment of perfect truth.

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART

AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty

of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in

terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in

its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the

honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any

abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it

as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century -

still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is

incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem

affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out

to you the general ideas which characterise the great English

Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as

far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as

that is possible.

I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of

new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance

of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and

comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive

attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new

forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I

call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent

expression of beauty.

It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought,

and again as a mere revival of mediaeval feeling. Rather I would

say that to these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever

of artistic value the intricacy and complexity and experience of

modern life can give: taking from the one its clearness of vision

and its sustained calm, from the other its variety of expression

and the mystery of its vision. For what, as Goethe said, is the

study of the ancients but a return to the real world (for that is

what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is mediaevalism but

individuality?

It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its

sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the

adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of

the romantic spirit, that springs the art of the nineteenth century

in England, as from the marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang

the beautiful boy Euphorion.

Such expressions as 'classical' and 'romantic' are, it is true,

often apt to become the mere catchwords of schools. We must always

remember that art has only one sentence to utter: there is for her

only one high law, the law of form or harmony - yet between the

classical and romantic spirit we may say that there lies this

difference at least, that the one deals with the type and the other

with the exception. In the work produced under the modern romantic

spirit it is no longer the permanent, the essential truths of life

that are treated of; it is the momentary situation of the one, the

momentary aspect of the other that art seeks to render. In

sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject

predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of

the other, the situation predominates over the subject.

There are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of

romance may be taken as forming the essential elements of our

conscious intellectual tradition, of our permanent standard of

taste. As regards their origin, in art as in politics there is but

one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a

nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of

expression. Yet, I think that in estimating the sensuous and

intellectual spirit which presides over our English Renaissance,

any attempt to isolate it in any way from in the progress and

movement and social life of the age that has produced it would be

to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true

meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this

crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do

with art and the love of art, we must take into account many great

events of history which seem to be the most opposed to any such

artistic feeling.

Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh

voice of a rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must

seem, in its passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion

to form, its exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French

Revolution that we must look for the most primary factor of its

production, the first condition of its birth: that great

Revolution of which we are all the children though the voices of

some of us be often loud against it; that Revolution to which at a

time when even such spirits as Coleridge and Wordsworth lost heart

in England, noble messages of love blown across seas came from your

young Republic.

It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has

shown us that neither in politics nor in nature are there

revolutions ever but evolutions only, and that the prelude to that

wild storm which swept over France in 1789 and made every king in

Europe tremble for his throne, was first sounded in literature

years before the Bastille fell and the Palace was taken. The way

for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by that critical

spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring all

things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the

discontent of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that

followed the life of Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent

lake and mountain, had called humanity back to the golden age that

still lies before us and preached a return to nature, in passionate

eloquence whose music still lingers about our keen northern air.

And Goethe and Scott had brought romance back again from the prison

she had lain in for so many centuries - and what is romance but

humanity?

Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and

terror of that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the

artistic Renaissance bent to her own service when the time came - a

scientific tendency first, which has borne in our own day a brood

of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in the sphere of poetry has not been

unproductive of good. I do not mean merely in its adding to

enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that

more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he

said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned expression

in the face of science, and that when science would put on a form

of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the

transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion

and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first

and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence

on the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the

sense of limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the

characteristics of the real artist.

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William

Blake, is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary

line, the more perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and

sharp the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and

bungling. 'Great inventors in all ages knew this - Michael Angelo

and Albert Durer are known by this and by this alone'; and another

time he wrote, with all the simple directness of nineteenth-century

prose, 'to generalise is to be an idiot.'

And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision,

this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great

work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante,

of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies

at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to

the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century

poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague

spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to

that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower

itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned

contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle-

like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy,

though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day,

bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to

Oxford, the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of

transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can

accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him

there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not

even the desire of escape.

He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the

essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The

metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous,

many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that

work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms most

clearly to the perfect facts of physical life.

'The storm of revolution,' as Andre Chenier said, 'blows out the

torch of poetry.' It is not for some little time that the real

influence of such a wild cataclysm of things is felt: at first the

desire for equality seems to have produced personalities of more

giant and Titan stature than the world had ever known before. Men

heard the lyre of Byron and the legions of Napoleon; it was a

period of measureless passions and of measureless despair;

ambition, discontent, were the chords of life and art; the age was

an age of revolt: a phase through which the human spirit must

pass, but one in which it cannot rest. For the aim of culture is

not rebellion but peace, the valley perilous where ignorant armies

clash by night being no dwelling-place meet for her to whom the

gods have assigned the fresh uplands and sunny heights and clear,

untroubled air.

And soon that desire for perfection, which lay at the base of the

Revolution, found in a young English poet its most complete and

flawless realisation.

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in

Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and

intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates

from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning

of the artistic renaissance of England.

Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and

clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring

sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the

imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner

of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement

of which I am to speak.

Blake had indeed, before him, claimed for art a lofty, spiritual

mission, and had striven to raise design to the ideal level of

poetry and music, but the remoteness of his vision both in painting

and poetry and the incompleteness of his technical powers had been

adverse to any real influence. It is in Keats that the artistic

spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation.

And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths

of the British public what is the meaning of the word aesthetics,

they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German

for a dado; and if you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will

hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort

of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing were the

chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one

of the necessary elements of English education.

As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough. In the

year 1847 a number of young men in London, poets and painters,

passionate admirers of Keats all of them, formed the habit of

meeting together for discussions on art, the result of such

discussions being that the English Philistine public was roused

suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing that there was in its

midst a body of young men who had determined to revolutionise

English painting and poetry. They called themselves the pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce

any serious beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen; and

besides this, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - among whom the names

of Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you

- had on their side three things that the English public never

forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm.

Satire, always as sterile as it in shameful and as impotent as it

is insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to

genius - doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public,

blinding them to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence

which is the source of all vileness and narrowness of life, but

harming the artist not at all, rather confirming him in the perfect

rightness of his work and ambition. For to disagree with three-

fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first

elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments

of spiritual doubt.

As regards the ideas these young men brought to the regeneration of

English art, we may see at the base of their artistic creations a

desire for a deeper spiritual value to be given to art as well as a

more decorative value.

Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the

early Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to

the facile abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism

of imagination, a more careful realism of technique, a vision at

once more fervent and more vivid, an individuality more intimate

and more intense.

For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the

aesthetic demands of its age: there must be also about it, if it

is to affect us with any permanent delight, the impress of a

distinct individuality, an individuality remote from that of

ordinary men, and coming near to us only by virtue of a certain

newness and wonder in the work, and through channels whose very

strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome.

LA PERSONNALITE, said one of the greatest of modem French critics,

VOILE CE QUI NOUS SAUVERA.

But above all things was it a return to Nature - that formula which

seems to suit so many and such diverse movements: they would draw

and paint nothing but what they saw, they would try and imagine

things as they really happened. Later there came to the old house

by Blackfriars Bridge, where this young brotherhood used to meet

and work, two young men from Oxford, Edward Burne-Jones and William

Morris - the latter substituting for the simpler realism of the

early days a more exquisite spirit of choice, a more faultless

devotion to beauty, a more intense seeking for perfection: a

master of all exquisite design and of all spiritual vision. It is

of the school of Florence rather than of that of Venice that he is

kinsman, feeling that the close imitation of Nature is a disturbing

element in imaginative art. The visible aspect of modern life

disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that

is beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend. To Morris we

owe poetry whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision

has not been excelled in the literature of our country, and by the

revival of the decorative arts he has given to our individualised

romantic movement the social idea and the social factor also.

But the revolution accomplished by this clique of young men, with

Ruskin's faultless and fervent eloquence to help them, was not one

of ideas merely but of execution, not one of conceptions but of

creations.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the

arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in

feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and

specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines

of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of

Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified

vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to

which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard

porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain.

The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of

the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has

been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no

way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of

any wider social aim. The critic may try and trace the deferred

resolutions of Beethoven to some sense of the incompleteness of the

modern intellectual spirit, but the artist would have answered, as

one of them did afterwards, 'Let them pick out the fifths and leave

us at peace.'

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French

metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this

increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious

words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and

Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and

trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the

poet may blow the music of their many messages.

And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a

reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax

execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the

work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater

splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than

English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti's poetry and

the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision

and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking

for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness

of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which

is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the

romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic

note was struck by Theophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to

read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a

poet's reading.

While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated

and discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal

qualities of its own, qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic

sense and not needing for their aesthetic effect any lofty

intellectual vision, any deep criticism of life or even any

passionate human emotion at all, the spirit and the method of the

poet's working - what people call his inspiration - have not

escaped the controlling influence of the artistic spirit. Not that

the imagination has lost its wings, but we have accustomed

ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to estimate their

limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable freedom.

To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production,

and the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness

in any artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in

the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We

find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of

such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust the

balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the

position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth's definition of

poetry as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' may be taken as an

analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work

has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be 'able to compose without

this fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to

substitute for poetic ardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,'

we may discern the most important moment in the evolution of that

artistic life. The question made an early and strange appearance

in your literature too; and I need not remind you how deeply the

young poets of the French romantic movement were excited and

stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the workings of his own

imagination in the creating of that supreme imaginative work which

we know by the name of THE RAVEN.

In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had

intruded to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to

poetry, it was against the claims of the understanding that an

artist like Goethe had to protest. 'The more incomprehensible to

the understanding a poem is the better for it,' he said once,

asserting the complete supremacy of the imagination in poetry as of

reason in prose. But in this century it is rather against the

claims of the emotional faculties, the claims of mere sentiment and

feeling, that the artist must react. The simple utterance of joy

is not poetry any more than a mere personal cry of pain, and the

real experiences of the artist are always those which do not find

their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into some

artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the

farthest removed and the most alien.

'The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains

poetry,' says Charles Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that

Theophile Gautier, most subtle of all modern critics, most

fascinating of all modern poets, was never tired of teaching -

'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.' The absolute

distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so

much as his power of rendering it. The entire subordination of all

intellectual and emotional faculties to the vital and informing

poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our

Renaissance.

We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful

and technical sphere of language, the sphere of expression as

opposed to subject, then controlling the imagination of the poet in

dealing with his subject. And now I would point out to you its

operation in the choice of subject. The recognition of a separate

realm for the artist, a consciousness of the absolute difference

between the world of art and the world of real fact, between

classic grace and absolute reality, forms not merely the essential

element of any aesthetic charm but is the characteristic of all

great imaginative work and of all great eras of artistic creation -

of the age of Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo, of the age

of Sophocles as of the age of Goethe.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of

the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us

that which we desire. For to most of us the real life is the life

we do not lead, and thus, remaining more true to the essence of its

own perfection, more jealous of its own unattainable beauty, is

less likely to forget form in feeling or to accept the passion of

creation as any substitute for the beauty of the created thing.

The artist is indeed the child of his own age, but the present will

not be to him a whit more real than the past; for, like the

philosopher of the Platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of

all time and of all existence. For him no form is obsolete, no

subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world

has known, in desert of Judaea or in Arcadian valley, by the rivers

of Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in the crowded and hideous

streets of a modern city or by the pleasant ways of Camelot - all

lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct with

beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for his own

spirit, no more; choosing some facts and rejecting others with the

calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of

beauty.

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all

things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the

secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit

nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain,

nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can

steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social

problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and

bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these

subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left

hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric.

This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron:

Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much

that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of

calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine,

imaginative work. But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate,

and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and

faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and

the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note.

It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a

clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to

placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus.

Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended;

the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For

art is very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute

truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr.

Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more

actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and

interesting as a type and figure but more positive and real.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal

considerations are no principle at all. For to the poet all times

and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and

eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present

preferable. The steam whistle will not affright him nor the flutes

of Arcadia weary him: for him there is but one time, the artistic

moment; but one law, the law of form; but one land, the land of

Beauty - a land removed indeed from the real world and yet more

sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which

dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not

from the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm

which despair and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so

it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he

who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of what is

accidental and transitory, stripped it of that 'mist of familiarity

which makes life obscure to us.'

Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of

ecstasy, those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the

secret of the earth and the burden of mystery, that guard and

glorify the chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome - do they not tell us

more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of

Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors

and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of

the history of Holland?

And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the

nineteenth century - the democratic and pantheistic tendency and

the tendency to value life for the sake of art - found their most

complete and perfect utterance in the poetry of Shelley and Keats

who, to the blind eyes of their own time, seemed to be as wanderers

in the wilderness, preachers of vague or unreal things. And I

remember once, in talking to Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science,

his saying to me, 'the more materialistic science becomes, the more

angels shall I paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the

immortality of the soul.'

But these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art.

Where in the arts themselves are we to find that breadth of human

sympathy which is the condition of all noble work; where in the

arts are we to look for what Mazzini would call the social ideas as

opposed to the merely personal ideas? By virtue of what claim do I

demand for the artist the love and loyalty of the men and women of

the world? I think I can answer that.

Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his aid is a matter

for his own soul. He may bring judgment like Michael Angelo or

peace like Angelico; he may come with mourning like the great

Athenian or with mirth like the singer of Sicily; nor is it for us

to do aught but accept his teaching, knowing that we cannot smite

the bitter lips of Leopardi into laughter or burden with our

discontent Goethe's serene calm. But for warrant of its truth such

message must have the flame of eloquence in the lips that speak it,

splendour and glory in the vision that is its witness, being

justified by one thing only - the flawless beauty and perfect form

of its expression: this indeed being the social idea, being the

meaning of joy in art.

Not laughter where none should laugh, nor the calling of peace

where there is no peace; not in painting the subject ever, but the

pictorial charm only, the wonder of its colour, the satisfying

beauty of its design.

You have most of you seen, probably, that great masterpiece of

Rubens which hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and

wonderful pageant of horse and rider arrested in its most exquisite

and fiery moment when the winds are caught in crimson banner and

the air lit by the gleam of armour and the flash of plume. Well,

that is joy in art, though that golden hillside be trodden by the

wounded feet of Christ and it is for the death of the Son of Man

that that gorgeous cavalcade is passing.

But this restless modern intellectual spirit of ours is not

receptive enough of the sensuous element of art; and so the real

influence of the arts is hidden from many of us: only a few,

escaping from the tyranny of the soul, have learned the secret of

those high hours when thought is not.

And this indeed is the reason of the influence which Eastern art is

having on us in Europe, and of the fascination of all Japanese

work. While the Western world has been laying on art the

intolerable burden of its own intellectual doubts and the spiritual

tragedy of its own sorrows, the East has always kept true to art's

primary and pictorial conditions.

In judging of a beautiful statue the aesthetic faculty is

absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those

marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of

those limbs that are powerless to help us. In its primary aspect a

painting has no more spiritual message or meaning than an exquisite

fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from the wall of

Damascus: it is a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more. The

channels by which all noble imaginative work in painting should

touch, and do touch the soul, are not those of the truths of life,

nor metaphysical truths. But that pictorial charm which does not

depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one hand,

nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the

other, comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of

colour. Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of

Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything

definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in

workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the

Greeks would say) an end in itself.

And so in poetry too, the real poetical quality, the joy of poetry,

comes never from the subject but from an inventive handling of

rhythmical language, from what Keats called the 'sensuous life of

verse.' The element of song in the singing accompanied by the

profound joy of motion, is so sweet that, while the incomplete

lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the thorn-

crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure; for our

delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like

Adonis, be beautiful in its agony; and when the poet's heart breaks

it will break in music.

And health in art - what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane

criticism of life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there

is in [Kingsley]. Health is the artist's recognition of the

limitations of the form in which he works. It is the honour and

the homage which he gives to the material he uses - whether it be

language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their glories

- knowing that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in

their borrowing one another's method, but in their producing, each

of them by its own individual means, each of them by keeping its

objective limits, the same unique artistic delight. The delight is

like that given to us by music - for music is the art in which form

and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be

separated from the method of its expression, the art which most

completely realises the artistic ideal, and is the condition to

which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

And criticism - what place is that to have in our culture? Well, I

think that the first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at

all times, and upon all subjects: C'EST UN GRAND AVANTAGE DE

N'AVOIR RIEN FAIT, MAIS IL NE FAUT PAS EN ABUSER.

It is only through the mystery of creation that one can gain any

knowledge of the quality of created things. You have listened to

PATIENCE for a hundred nights and you have heard me for one only.

It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing

something about the subject of it, but you must not judge of

aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert. As little should you

judge of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that

dances in the beam, or the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take

your critic for any sane test of art. For the artists, like the

Greek gods, are revealed only to one another, as Emerson says

somewhere; their real value and place time only can show. In this

respect also omnipotence is with the ages. The true critic

addresses not the artist ever but the public only. His work lies

with them. Art can never have any other claim but her own

perfection: it is for the critic to create for art the social aim,

too, by teaching the people the spirit in which they are to

approach all artistic work, the love they are to give it, the

lesson they are to draw from it.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern

progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for

the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,'

are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has

fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions:

it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of

such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions.

'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for

anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great

men and the principle of Beauty.'

Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and

underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and

wonderful, productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities,

yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and in the

decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased comeliness

and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not

complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful

national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed

that; no great drama without a noble national life, and the

commercial spirit of England has killed that too.

It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the

burden of the modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with

the fire of romantic passion - the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the

chapel of the Medici show us that - but it is that, as Theophile

Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, LE MONDE VISIBLE A

DISPARU.

Nor is it again that the novel has killed the play, as some critics

would persuade us - the romantic movement of France shows us that.

The work of Balzac and of Hugo grew up side by side together; nay,

more, were complementary to each other, though neither of them saw

it. While all other forms of poetry may flourish in an ignoble

age, the splendid individualism of the lyrist, fed by its own

passion, and lit by its own power, may pass as a pillar of fire as

well across the desert as across places that are pleasant. It is

none the less glorious though no man follow it - nay, by the

greater sublimity of its loneliness it may be quickened into

loftier utterance and intensified into clearer song. From the mean

squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the

idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with

fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun

and Bassarid dance there no more. Like Keats he may wander through

the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like Morris on the

galley's deck with the Viking when king and galley have long since

passed away. But the drama is the meeting-place of art and life;

it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with man, but with social

man, with man in his relation to God and to Humanity. It is the

product of a period of great national united energy; it is

impossible without a noble public, and belongs to such ages as the

age of Elizabeth in London and of Pericles at Athens; it is part of

such lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greek after the

defeat of the Persian fleet, and to Englishman after the wreck of

the Armada of Spain.

Shelley felt how incomplete our movement was in this respect, and

has shown in one great tragedy by what terror and pity he would

have purified our age; but in spite of THE CENCI the drama is one

of the artistic forms through which the genius of the England of

this century seeks in vain to find outlet and expression. He has

had no worthy imitators.

It is rather, perhaps, to you that we should turn to complete and

perfect this great movement of ours, for there is something

Hellenic in your air and world, something that has a quicker breath

of the joy and power of Elizabeth's England about it than our

ancient civilisation can give us. For you, at least, are young;

'no hungry generations tread you down,' and the past does not weary

you with the intolerable burden of its memories nor mock you with

the ruins of a beauty, the secret of whose creation you have lost.

That very absence of tradition, which Mr. Ruskin thought would rob

your rivers of their laughter and your flowers of their light, may

be rather the source of your freedom and your strength.

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance

of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the

sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, has been

defined by one of your poets as a flawless triumph of art. It is a

triumph which you above all nations may be destined to achieve.

For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not

the chosen music of Liberty only; other messages are there in the

wonder of wind-swept height and the majesty of silent deep -

messages that, if you will but listen to them, may yield you the

splendour of some new imagination, the marvel of some new beauty.

'I foresee,' said Goethe, 'the dawn of a new literature which all

people may claim as their own, for all have contributed to its

foundation.' If, then, this is so, and if the materials for a

civilisation as great as that of Europe lie all around you, what

profit, you will ask me, will all this study of our poets and

painters be to you? I might answer that the intellect can be

engaged without direct didactic object on an artistic and

historical problem; that the demand of the intellect is merely to

feel itself alive; that nothing which has ever interested men or

women can cease to be a fit subject for culture.

I might remind you of what all Europe owes to the sorrow of a

single Florentine in exile at Verona, or to the love of Petrarch by

that little well in Southern France; nay, more, how even in this

dull, materialistic age the simple expression of an old man's

simple life, passed away from the clamour of great cities amid the

lakes and misty hills of Cumberland, has opened out for England

treasures of new joy compared with which the treasures of her

luxury are as barren as the sea which she has made her highway, and

as bitter as the fire which she would make her slave.

But I think it will bring you something besides this, something

that is the knowledge of real strength in art: not that you should

imitate the works of these men; but their artistic spirit, their

artistic attitude, I think you should absorb that.

For in nations, as in individuals, if the passion for creation be

not accompanied by the critical, the aesthetic faculty also, it

will be sure to waste its strength aimlessly, failing perhaps in

the artistic spirit of choice, or in the mistaking of feeling for

form, or in the following of false ideals.

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural

affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the

qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its

powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before

us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral

supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never

talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written

or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals

or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often

a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of

discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good

work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said

Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is

obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as

soon as we are aware of it.'

But, as in your cities so in your literature, it is a permanent

canon and standard of taste, an increased sensibility to beauty (if

I may say so) that is lacking. All noble work is not national

merely, but universal. The political independence of a nation must

not be confused with any intellectual isolation. The spiritual

freedom, indeed, your own generous lives and liberal air will give

you. From us you will learn the classical restraint of form.

For all great art is delicate art, roughness having very little to

do with strength, and harshness very little to do with power. 'The

artist,' as Mr. Swinburne says, 'must be perfectly articulate.'

This limitation is for the artist perfect freedom: it is at once

the origin and the sign of his strength. So that all the supreme

masters of style - Dante, Sophocles, Shakespeare - are the supreme

masters of spiritual and intellectual vision also.

Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will

be added to you.

This devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things is

the test of all great civilised nations. Philosophy may teach us

to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbours, and

science resolve the moral sense into a secretion of sugar, but art

is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament and not a

speculation, art is what makes the life of the whole race immortal.

For beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies

fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the

withered leaves of autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all

seasons and a possession for all eternity.

Wars and the clash of armies and the meeting of men in battle by

trampled field or leaguered city, and the rising of nations there

must always be. But I think that art, by creating a common

intellectual atmosphere between all countries, might - if it could

not overshadow the world with the silver wings of peace - at least

make men such brothers that they would not go out to slay one

another for the whim or folly of some king or minister, as they do

in Europe. Fraternity would come no more with the hands of Cain,

nor Liberty betray freedom with the kiss of Anarchy; for national

hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest.

'How could I?' said Goethe, when reproached for not writing like

Korner against the French. 'How could I, to whom barbarism and

culture alone are of importance, hate a nation which is among the

most cultivated of the earth, a nation to which I owe a great part

of my own cultivation?'

Mighty empires, too, there must always be as long as personal

ambition and the spirit of the age are one, but art at least is the

only empire which a nation's enemies cannot take from her by

conquest, but which is taken by submission only. The sovereignty

of Greece and Rome is not yet passed away, though the gods of the

one be dead and the eagles of the other tired.

And we in our Renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that

will still be England's when her yellow leopards have grown weary

of wars and the rose of her shield is crimsoned no more with the

blood of battle; and you, too, absorbing into the generous heart of

a great people this pervading artistic spirit, will create for

yourselves such riches as you have never yet created, though your

land be a network of railways and your cities the harbours for the

galleys of the world.

I know, indeed, that the divine natural prescience of beauty which

is the inalienable inheritance of Greek and Italian is not our

inheritance. For such an informing and presiding spirit of art to

shield us from all harsh and alien influences, we of the Northern

races must turn rather to that strained self-consciousness of our

age which, as it is the key-note of all our romantic art, must be

the source of all or nearly all our culture. I mean that

intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century which is always

looking for the secret of the life that still lingers round old and

bygone forms of culture. It takes from each what is serviceable

for the modern spirit - from Athens its wonder without its worship,

from Venice its splendour without its sin. The same spirit is

always analysing its own strength and its own weakness, counting

what it owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and

to the palm-trees of Lebanon, to Gethsemane and to the garden of

Proserpine.

And yet the truths of art cannot be taught: they are revealed

only, revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of

all beautiful impressions by the study and worship of all beautiful

things. And hence the enormous importance given to the decorative

arts in our English Renaissance; hence all that marvel of design

that comes from the hand of Edward Burne-Jones, all that weaving of

tapestry and staining of glass, that beautiful working in clay and

metal and wood which we owe to William Morris, the greatest

handicraftsman we have had in England since the fourteenth century.

So, in years to come there will be nothing in any man's house which

has not given delight to its maker and does not give delight to its

user. The children, like the children of Plato's perfect city,

will grow up 'in a simple atmosphere of all fair things' - I quote

from the passage in the REPUBLIC - 'a simple atmosphere of all fair

things, where beauty, which is the spirit of art, will come on eye

and ear like a fresh breath of wind that brings health from a clear

upland, and insensibly and gradually draw the child's soul into

harmony with all knowledge and all wisdom, so that he will love

what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly (for

they always go together) long before he knows the reason why; and

then when reason comes will kiss her on the cheek as a friend.'

That is what Plato thought decorative art could do for a nation,

feeling that the secret not of philosophy merely but of all

gracious existence might be externally hidden from any one whose

youth had been passed in uncomely and vulgar surroundings, and that

the beauty of form and colour even, as he says, in the meanest

vessels of the house, will find its way into the inmost places of

the soul and lead the boy naturally to look for that divine harmony

of spiritual life of which art was to him the material symbol and

warrant.

Prelude indeed to all knowledge and all wisdom will this love of

beautiful things be for us; yet there are times when wisdom becomes

a burden and knowledge is one with sorrow: for as every body has

its shadow so every soul has its scepticism. In such dread moments

of discord and despair where should we, of this torn and troubled

age, turn our steps if not to that secure house of beauty where

there is always a little forgetfulness, always a great joy; to that

CITTE DIVINA, as the old Italian heresy called it, the divine city

where one can stand, though only for a brief moment, apart from the

division and terror of the world and the choice of the world too?

This is that CONSOLATION DES ARTS which is the key-note of

Gautier's poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed - as

indeed what in our century is not? - by Goethe. You remember what

he said to the German people: 'Only have the courage,' he said,

'to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be

delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something

great.' The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions:

yes, that is the secret of the artistic life - for while art has

been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an

escape rather from the tyranny of the soul. But only to those who

worship her above all things does she ever reveal her true

treasure: else will she be as powerless to aid you as the

mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical

nature of Heine.

And indeed I think it would be impossible to overrate the gain that

might follow if we had about us only what gave pleasure to the

maker of it and gives pleasure to its user, that being the simplest

of all rules about decoration. One thing, at least, I think it

would do for us: there is no surer test of a great country than

how near it stands to its own poets; but between the singers of our

day and the workers to whom they would sing there seems to be an

ever-widening and dividing chasm, a chasm which slander and mockery

cannot traverse, but which is spanned by the luminous wings of

love.

And of such love I think that the abiding presence in our houses of

noble imaginative work would be the surest seed and preparation. I

do not mean merely as regards that direct literary expression of

art by which, from the little red-and-black cruse of oil or wine, a

Greek boy could learn of the lionlike splendour of Achilles, of the

strength of Hector and the beauty of Paris and the wonder of Helen,

long before he stood and listened in crowded market-place or in

theatre of marble; or by which an Italian child of the fifteenth

century could know of the chastity of Lucrece and the death of

Camilla from carven doorway and from painted chest. For the good

we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become

through it. Its real influence will be in giving the mind that

enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to

demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of

common life for us - whether it be by giving the most spiritual

interpretation of one's own moments of highest passion or the most

sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed

from sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination

for their own sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things.

For he who does not love art in all things does not love it at all,

and he who does not need art in all things does not need it at all.

I will not dwell here on what I am sure has delighted you all in

our great Gothic cathedrals. I mean how the artist of that time,

handicraftsman himself in stone or glass, found the best motives

for his art, always ready for his hand and always beautiful, in the

daily work of the artificers he saw around him - as in those lovely

windows of Chartres - where the dyer dips in the vat and the potter

sits at the wheel, and the weaver stands at the loom: real

manufacturers these, workers with the hand, and entirely delightful

to look at, not like the smug and vapid shopman of our time, who

knows nothing of the web or vase he sells, except that he is

charging you double its value and thinking you a fool for buying

it. Nor can I but just note, in passing, the immense influence the

decorative work of Greece and Italy had on its artists, the one

teaching the sculptor that restraining influence of design which is

the glory of the Parthenon, the other keeping painting always true

to its primary, pictorial condition of noble colour which is the

secret of the school of Venice; for I wish rather, in this lecture

at least, to dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human

life - on its social not its purely artistic effect.

There are two kinds of men in the world, two great creeds, two

different forms of natures: men to whom the end of life is action,

and men to whom the end of life is thought. As regards the latter,

who seek for experience itself and not for the fruits of

experience, who must burn always with one of the passions of this

fiery-coloured world, who find life interesting not for its secret

but for its situations, for its pulsations and not for its purpose;

the passion for beauty engendered by the decorative arts will be to

them more satisfying than any political or religious enthusiasm,

any enthusiasm for humanity, any ecstasy or sorrow for love. For

art comes to one professing primarily to give nothing but the

highest quality to one's moments, and for those moments' sake. So

far for those to whom the end of life is thought. As regards the

others, who hold that life is inseparable from labour, to them

should this movement be specially dear: for, if our days are

barren without industry, industry without art is barbarism.

Hewers of wood and drawers of water there must be always indeed

among us. Our modern machinery has not much lightened the labour

of man after all: but at least let the pitcher that stands by the

well be beautiful and surely the labour of the day will be

lightened: let the wood be made receptive of some lovely form,

some gracious design, and there will come no longer discontent but

joy to the toiler. For what is decoration but the worker's

expression of joy in his work? And not joy merely - that is a

great thing yet not enough - but that opportunity of expressing his

own individuality which, as it is the essence of all life, is the

source of all art. 'I have tried,' I remember William Morris

saying to me once, 'I have tried to make each of my workers an

artist, and when I say an artist I mean a man.' For the worker

then, handicraftsman of whatever kind he is, art is no longer to be

a purple robe woven by a slave and thrown over the whitened body of

a leprous king to hide and to adorn the sin of his luxury, but

rather the beautiful and noble expression of a life that has in it

something beautiful and noble.

And so you must seek out your workman and give him, as far as

possible, the right surroundings, for remember that the real test

and virtue of a workman is not his earnestness nor his industry

even, but his power of design merely; and that 'design is not the

offspring of idle fancy: it is the studied result of accumulative

observation and delightful habit.' All the teaching in the world

is of no avail if you do not surround your workman with happy

influences and with beautiful things. It is impossible for him to

have right ideas about colour unless he sees the lovely colours of

Nature unspoiled; impossible for him to supply beautiful incident

and action unless he sees beautiful incident and action in the

world about him.

For to cultivate sympathy you must be among living things and

thinking about them, and to cultivate admiration you must be among

beautiful things and looking at them. 'The steel of Toledo and the

silk of Genoa did but give strength to oppression and lustre to

pride,' as Mr. Ruskin says; let it be for you to create an art that

is made by the hands of the people for the joy of the people, to

please the hearts of the people, too; an art that will be your

expression of your delight in life. There is nothing 'in common

life too mean, in common things too trivial to be ennobled by your

touch'; nothing in life that art cannot sanctify.

You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected

with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you,

erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men. Well, let

me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in

spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable

fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in

England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally

adapted for decorative art - the gaudy leonine beauty of the one

and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the

most entire and perfect joy. And so with you: let there be no

flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around

your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not

lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or brier

that does not live for ever in carven arch or window or marble, no

bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its

colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more

precious the preciousness of simple adornment.

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of

life. Well, the secret of life is in art.

HOUSE DECORATION

IN my last lecture I gave you something of the history of Art in

England. I sought to trace the influence of the French Revolution

upon its development. I said something of the song of Keats and

the school of the pre-Raphaelites. But I do not want to shelter

the movement, which I have called the English Renaissance, under

any palladium however noble, or any name however revered. The

roots of it have, indeed, to be sought for in things that have long

passed away, and not, as some suppose, in the fancy of a few young

men - although I am not altogether sure that there is anything much

better than the fancy of a few young men.

When I appeared before you on a previous occasion, I had seen

nothing of American art save the Doric columns and Corinthian

chimney-pots visible on your Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Since

then, I have been through your country to some fifty or sixty

different cities, I think. I find that what your people need is

not so much high imaginative art but that which hallows the vessels

of everyday use. I suppose that the poet will sing and the artist

will paint regardless whether the world praises or blames. He has

his own world and is independent of his fellow-men. But the

handicraftsman is dependent on your pleasure and opinion. He needs

your encouragement and he must have beautiful surroundings. Your

people love art but do not sufficiently honour the handicraftsman.

Of course, those millionaires who can pillage Europe for their

pleasure need have no care to encourage such; but I speak for those

whose desire for beautiful things is larger than their means. I

find that one great trouble all over is that your workmen are not

given to noble designs. You cannot be indifferent to this, because

Art is not something which you can take or leave. It is a

necessity of human life.

And what is the meaning of this beautiful decoration which we call

art? In the first place, it means value to the workman and it

means the pleasure which he must necessarily take in making a

beautiful thing. The mark of all good art is not that the thing

done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but

that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart. I

cannot impress the point too frequently that beautiful and rational

designs are necessary in all work. I did not imagine, until I went

into some of your simpler cities, that there was so much bad work

done. I found, where I went, bad wall-papers horribly designed,

and coloured carpets, and that old offender the horse-hair sofa,

whose stolid look of indifference is always so depressing. I found

meaningless chandeliers and machine-made furniture, generally of

rosewood, which creaked dismally under the weight of the ubiquitous

interviewer. I came across the small iron stove which they always

persist in decorating with machine-made ornaments, and which is as

great a bore as a wet day or any other particularly dreadful

institution. When unusual extravagance was indulged in, it was

garnished with two funeral urns.

It must always be remembered that what is well and carefully made

by an honest workman, after a rational design, increases in beauty

and value as the years go on. The old furniture brought over by

the Pilgrims, two hundred years ago, which I saw in New England, is

just as good and as beautiful to-day as it was when it first came

here. Now, what you must do is to bring artists and handicraftsmen

together. Handicraftsmen cannot live, certainly cannot thrive,

without such companionship. Separate these two and you rob art of

all spiritual motive.

Having done this, you must place your workman in the midst of

beautiful surroundings. The artist is not dependent on the visible

and the tangible. He has his visions and his dreams to feed on.

But the workman must see lovely forms as he goes to his work in the

morning and returns at eventide. And, in connection with this, I

want to assure you that noble and beautiful designs are never the

result of idle fancy or purposeless day-dreaming. They come only

as the accumulation of habits of long and delightful observation.

And yet such things may not be taught. Right ideas concerning them

can certainly be obtained only by those who have been accustomed to

rooms that are beautiful and colours that are satisfying.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to do is to choose

a notable and joyous dress for men. There would be more joy in

life if we were to accustom ourselves to use all the beautiful

colours we can in fashioning our own clothes. The dress of the

future, I think, will use drapery to a great extent and will abound

with joyous colour. At present we have lost all nobility of dress

and, in doing so, have almost annihilated the modern sculptor.

And, in looking around at the figures which adorn our parks, one

could almost wish that we had completely killed the noble art. To

see the frock-coat of the drawing-room done in bronze, or the

double waistcoat perpetuated in marble, adds a new horror to death.

But indeed, in looking through the history of costume, seeking an

answer to the questions we have propounded, there is little that is

either beautiful or appropriate. One of the earliest forms is the

Greek drapery which is exquisite for young girls. And then, I

think we may be pardoned a little enthusiasm over the dress of the

time of Charles I., so beautiful indeed, that in spite of its

invention being with the Cavaliers it was copied by the Puritans.

And the dress for the children of that time must not be passed

over. It was a very golden age of the little ones. I do not think

that they have ever looked so lovely as they do in the pictures of

that time. The dress of the last century in England is also

peculiarly gracious and graceful. There is nothing bizarre or

strange about it, but it is full of harmony and beauty. In these

days, when we have suffered dreadfully from the incursions of the

modern milliner, we hear ladies boast that they do not wear a dress

more than once. In the old days, when the dresses were decorated

with beautiful designs and worked with exquisite embroidery, ladies

rather took a pride in bringing out the garment and wearing it many

times and handing it down to their daughters - a process that

would, I think, be quite appreciated by a modern husband when

called upon to settle his wife's bills.

And how shall men dress? Men say that they do not particularly

care how they dress, and that it is little matter. I am bound to

reply that I do not think that you do. In all my journeys through

the country, the only well-dressed men that I saw - and in saying

this I earnestly deprecate the polished indignation of your Fifth

Avenue dandies - were the Western miners. Their wide-brimmed hats,

which shaded their faces from the sun and protected them from the

rain, and the cloak, which is by far the most beautiful piece of

drapery ever invented, may well be dwelt on with admiration. Their

high boots, too, were sensible and practical. They wore only what

was comfortable, and therefore beautiful. As I looked at them I

could not help thinking with regret of the time when these

picturesque miners would have made their fortunes and would go East

to assume again all the abominations of modern fashionable attire.

Indeed, so concerned was I that I made some of them promise that

when they again appeared in the more crowded scenes of Eastern

civilisation they would still continue to wear their lovely

costume. But I do not believe they will.

Now, what America wants to-day is a school of rational art. Bad

art is a great deal worse than no art at all. You must show your

workmen specimens of good work so that they come to know what is

simple and true and beautiful. To that end I would have you have a

museum attached to these schools - not one of those dreadful modern

institutions where there is a stuffed and very dusty giraffe, and a

case or two of fossils, but a place where there are gathered

examples of art decoration from various periods and countries.

Such a place is the South Kensington Museum in London, whereon we

build greater hopes for the future than on any other one thing.

There I go every Saturday night, when the museum is open later than

usual, to see the handicraftsman, the wood-worker, the glass-blower

and the worker in metals. And it is here that the man of

refinement and culture comes face to face with the workman who

ministers to his joy. He comes to know more of the nobility of the

workman, and the workman, feeling the appreciation, comes to know

more of the nobility of his work.

You have too many white walls. More colour is wanted. You should

have such men as Whistler among you to teach you the beauty and joy

of colour. Take Mr. Whistler's 'Symphony in White,' which you no

doubt have imagined to be something quite bizarre. It is nothing

of the sort. Think of a cool grey sky flecked here and there with

white clouds, a grey ocean and three wonderfully beautiful figures

robed in white, leaning over the water and dropping white flowers

from their fingers. Here is no extensive intellectual scheme to

trouble you, and no metaphysics of which we have had quite enough

in art. But if the simple and unaided colour strike the right

keynote, the whole conception is made clear. I regard Mr.

Whistler's famous Peacock Room as the finest thing in colour and

art decoration which the world has known since Correggio painted

that wonderful room in Italy where the little children are dancing

on the walls. Mr. Whistler finished another room just before I

came away - a breakfast room in blue and yellow. The ceiling was a

light blue, the cabinet-work and the furniture were of a yellow

wood, the curtains at the windows were white and worked in yellow,

and when the table was set for breakfast with dainty blue china

nothing can be conceived at once so simple and so joyous.

The fault which I have observed in most of your rooms is that there

is apparent no definite scheme of colour. Everything is not

attuned to a key-note as it should be. The apartments are crowded

with pretty things which have no relation to one another. Again,

your artists must decorate what is more simply useful. In your art

schools I found no attempt to decorate such things as the vessels

for water. I know of nothing uglier than the ordinary jug or

pitcher. A museum could be filled with the different kinds of

water vessels which are used in hot countries. Yet we continue to

submit to the depressing jug with the handle all on one side. I do

not see the wisdom of decorating dinner-plates with sunsets and

soup-plates with moonlight scenes. I do not think it adds anything

to the pleasure of the canvas-back duck to take it out of such

glories. Besides, we do not want a soup-plate whose bottom seems

to vanish in the distance. One feels neither safe nor comfortable

under such conditions. In fact, I did not find in the art schools

of the country that the difference was explained between decorative

and imaginative art.

The conditions of art should be simple. A great deal more depends

upon the heart than upon the head. Appreciation of art is not

secured by any elaborate scheme of learning. Art requires a good

healthy atmosphere. The motives for art are still around about us

as they were round about the ancients. And the subjects are also

easily found by the earnest sculptor and the painter. Nothing is

more picturesque and graceful than a man at work. The artist who

goes to the children's playground, watches them at their sport and

sees the boy stoop to tie his shoe, will find the same themes that

engaged the attention of the ancient Greeks, and such observation

and the illustrations which follow will do much to correct that

foolish impression that mental and physical beauty are always

divorced.

To you, more than perhaps to any other country, has Nature been

generous in furnishing material for art workers to work in. You

have marble quarries where the stone is more beautiful in colour

than any the Greeks ever had for their beautiful work, and yet day

after day I am confronted with the great building of some stupid

man who has used the beautiful material as if it were not precious

almost beyond speech. Marble should not be used save by noble

workmen. There is nothing which gave me a greater sense of

barrenness in travelling through the country than the entire

absence of wood carving on your houses. Wood carving is the

simplest of the decorative arts. In Switzerland the little

barefooted boy beautifies the porch of his father's house with

examples of skill in this direction. Why should not American boys

do a great deal more and better than Swiss boys?

There is nothing to my mind more coarse in conception and more

vulgar in execution than modern jewellery. This is something that

can easily be corrected. Something better should be made out of

the beautiful gold which is stored up in your mountain hollows and

strewn along your river beds. When I was at Leadville and

reflected that all the shining silver that I saw coming from the

mines would be made into ugly dollars, it made me sad. It should

be made into something more permanent. The golden gates at

Florence are as beautiful to-day as when Michael Angelo saw them.

We should see more of the workman than we do. We should not be

content to have the salesman stand between us - the salesman who

knows nothing of what he is selling save that he is charging a

great deal too much for it. And watching the workman will teach

that most important lesson - the nobility of all rational

workmanship.

I said in my last lecture that art would create a new brotherhood

among men by furnishing a universal language. I said that under

its beneficent influences war might pass away. Thinking this, what

place can I ascribe to art in our education? If children grow up

among all fair and lovely things, they will grow to love beauty and

detest ugliness before they know the reason why. If you go into a

house where everything is coarse, you find things chipped and

broken and unsightly. Nobody exercises any care. If everything is

dainty and delicate, gentleness and refinement of manner are

unconsciously acquired. When I was in San Francisco I used to

visit the Chinese Quarter frequently. There I used to watch a

great hulking Chinese workman at his task of digging, and used to

see him every day drink his tea from a little cup as delicate in

texture as the petal of a flower, whereas in all the grand hotels

of the land, where thousands of dollars have been lavished on great

gilt mirrors and gaudy columns, I have been given my coffee or my

chocolate in cups an inch and a quarter thick. I think I have

deserved something nicer.

The art systems of the past have been devised by philosophers who

looked upon human beings as obstructions. They have tried to

educate boys' minds before they had any. How much better it would

be in these early years to teach children to use their hands in the

rational service of mankind. I would have a workshop attached to

every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple

decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children. And

you would soon raise up a race of handicraftsmen who would

transform the face of your country. I have seen only one such

school in the United States, and this was in Philadelphia and was

founded by my friend Mr. Leyland. I stopped there yesterday and

have brought some of the work here this afternoon to show you.

Here are two disks of beaten brass: the designs on them are

beautiful, the workmanship is simple, and the entire result is

satisfactory. The work was done by a little boy twelve years old.

This is a wooden bowl decorated by a little girl of thirteen. The

design is lovely and the colouring delicate and pretty. Here you

see a piece of beautiful wood carving accomplished by a little boy

of nine. In such work as this, children learn sincerity in art.

They learn to abhor the liar in art - the man who paints wood to

look like iron, or iron to look like stone. It is a practical

school of morals. No better way is there to learn to love Nature

than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field.

And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing

becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw

the customary stone. What we want is something spiritual added to

life. Nothing is so ignoble that Art cannot sanctify it.

ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN

PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between what is

beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty

except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and

utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because

beautiful decoration is always on the side of the beautiful thing,

because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you

put a thing to and the value placed on it. No workman will

beautifully decorate bad work, nor can you possibly get good

handicraftsmen or workmen without having beautiful designs. You

should be quite sure of that. If you have poor and worthless

designs in any craft or trade you will get poor and worthless

workmen only, but the minute you have noble and beautiful designs,

then you get men of power and intellect and feeling to work for

you. By having good designs you have workmen who work not merely

with their hands but with their hearts and heads too; otherwise you

will get merely the fool or the loafer to work for you.

That the beauty of life is a thing of no moment, I suppose few

people would venture to assert. And yet most civilised people act

as if it were of none, and in so doing are wronging both themselves

and those that are to come after them. For that beauty which is

meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can

take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live

as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be

less than men.

Do not think that the commercial spirit which is the basis of your

life and cities here is opposed to art. Who built the beautiful

cities of the world but commercial men and commercial men only?

Genoa built by its traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice,

most lovely of all, by its noble and honest merchants.

I do not wish you, remember, 'to build a new Pisa,' nor to bring

'the life or the decorations of the thirteenth century back again.'

'The circumstances with which you must surround your workmen are

those' of modern American life, 'because the designs you have now

to ask for from your workmen are such as will make modern' American

'life beautiful.' The art we want is the art based on all the

inventions of modern civilisation, and to suit all the needs of

nineteenth-century life.

Do you think, for instance, that we object to machinery? I tell

you we reverence it; we reverence it when it does its proper work,

when it relieves man from ignoble and soulless labour, not when it

seeks to do that which is valuable only when wrought by the hands

and hearts of men. Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it

is all bad and worthless and ugly. And let us not mistake the

means of civilisation for the end of civilisation; steam-engine,

telephone and the like, are all wonderful, but remember that their

value depends entirely on the noble uses we make of them, on the

noble spirit in which we employ them, not on the things themselves.

It is, no doubt, a great advantage to talk to a man at the

Antipodes through a telephone; its advantage depends entirely on

the value of what the two men have to say to one another. If one

merely shrieks slander through a tube and the other whispers folly

into a wire, do not think that anybody is very much benefited by

the invention.

The train that whirls an ordinary Englishman through Italy at the

rate of forty miles an hour and finally sends him home without any

memory of that lovely country but that he was cheated by a courier

at Rome, or that he got a bad dinner at Verona, does not do him or

civilisation much good. But that swift legion of fiery-footed

engines that bore to the burning ruins of Chicago the loving help

and generous treasure of the world was as noble and as beautiful as

any golden troop of angels that ever fed the hungry and clothed the

naked in the antique times. As beautiful, yes; all machinery may

be beautiful when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate

it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the

line of strength and the line of beauty being one.

Give then, as I said, to your workmen of to-day the bright and

noble surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately and

simple architecture for your cities, bright and simple dress for

your men and women; those are the conditions of a real artistic

movement. For the artist is not concerned primarily with any

theory of life but with life itself, with the joy and loveliness

that should come daily on eye and ear for a beautiful external

world.

But the simplicity must not be barrenness nor the bright colour

gaudy. For all beautiful colours are graduated colours, the

colours that seem about to pass into one another's realm - colour

without tone being like music without harmony, mere discord.

Barren architecture, the vulgar and glaring advertisements that

desecrate not merely your cities but every rock and river that I

have seen yet in America - all this is not enough. A school of

design we must have too in each city. It should be a stately and

noble building, full of the best examples of the best art of the

world. Furthermore, do not put your designers in a barren

whitewashed room and bid them work in that depressing and

colourless atmosphere as I have seen many of the American schools

of design, but give them beautiful surroundings. Because you want

to produce a permanent canon and standard of taste in your workman,

he must have always by him and before him specimens of the best

decorative art of the world, so that you can say to him: 'This is

good work. Greek or Italian or Japanese wrought it so many years

ago, but it is eternally young because eternally beautiful.' Work

in this spirit and you will be sure to be right. Do not copy it,

but work with the same love, the same reverence, the same freedom

of imagination. You must teach him colour and design, how all

beautiful colours are graduated colours and glaring colours the

essence of vulgarity. Show him the quality of any beautiful work

of nature like the rose, or any beautiful work of art like an

Eastern carpet - being merely the exquisite gradation of colour,

one tone answering another like the answering chords of a symphony.

Teach him how the true designer is not he who makes the design and

then colours it, but he who designs in colour, creates in colour,

thinks in colour too. Show him how the most gorgeous stained-glass

windows of Europe are filled with white glass, and the most

gorgeous Eastern tapestry with toned colours - the primary colours

in both places being set in the white glass, and the tone colours

like brilliant jewels set in dusky gold. And then as regards

design, show him how the real designer will take first any given

limited space, little disk of silver, it may be, like a Greek coin,

or wide expanse of fretted ceiling or lordly wall as Tintoret chose

at Venice (it does not matter which), and to this limited space -

the first condition of decoration being the limitation of the size

of the material used - he will give the effect of its being filled

with beautiful decoration, filled with it as a golden cup will be

filled with wine, so complete that you should not be able to take

away anything from it or add anything to it. For from a good piece

of design you can take away nothing, nor can you add anything to

it, each little bit of design being as absolutely necessary and as

vitally important to the whole effect as a note or chord of music

is for a sonata of Beethoven.

But I said the effect of its being so filled, because this, again,

is of the essence of good design. With a simple spray of leaves

and a bird in flight a Japanese artist will give you the impression

that he has completely covered with lovely design the reed fan or

lacquer cabinet at which he is working, merely because he knows the

exact spot in which to place them. All good design depends on the

texture of the utensil used and the use you wish to put it to. One

of the first things I saw in an American school of design was a

young lady painting a romantic moonlight landscape on a large round

dish, and another young lady covering a set of dinner plates with a

series of sunsets of the most remarkable colours. Let your ladies

paint moonlight landscapes and sunsets, but do not let them paint

them on dinner plates or dishes. Let them take canvas or paper for

such work, but not clay or china. They are merely painting the

wrong subjects on the wrong material, that is all. They have not

been taught that every material and texture has certain qualities

of its own. The design suitable for one is quite wrong for the

other, just as the design which you should work on a flat table-

cover ought to be quite different from the design you would work on

a curtain, for the one will always be straight, the other broken

into folds; and the use too one puts the object to should guide one

in the choice of design. One does not want to eat one's terrapins

off a romantic moonlight nor one's clams off a harrowing sunset.

Glory of sun and moon, let them be wrought for us by our landscape

artist and be on the walls of the rooms we sit in to remind us of

the undying beauty of the sunsets that fade and die, but do not let

us eat our soup off them and send them down to the kitchen twice a

day to be washed and scrubbed by the handmaid.

All these things are simple enough, yet nearly always forgotten.

Your school of design here will teach your girls and your boys,

your handicraftsmen of the future (for all your schools of art

should be local schools, the schools of particular cities). We

talk of the Italian school of painting, but there is no Italian

school; there were the schools of each city. Every town in Italy,

from Venice itself, queen of the sea, to the little hill fortress

of Perugia, each had its own school of art, each different and all

beautiful.

So do not mind what art Philadelphia or New York is having, but

make by the hands of your own citizens beautiful art for the joy of

your own citizens, for you have here the primary elements of a

great artistic movement.

For, believe me, the conditions of art are much simpler than people

imagine. For the noblest art one requires a clear healthy

atmosphere, not polluted as the air of our English cities is by the

smoke and grime and horridness which comes from open furnace and

from factory chimney. You must have strong, sane, healthy physique

among your men and women. Sickly or idle or melancholy people do

not do much in art. And lastly, you require a sense of

individualism about each man and woman, for this is the essence of

art - a desire on the part of man to express himself in the noblest

way possible. And this is the reason that the grandest art of the

world always came from a republic: Athens, Venice, and Florence -

there were no kings there and so their art was as noble and simple

as sincere. But if you want to know what kind of art the folly of

kings will impose on a country look at the decorative art of France

under the GRAND MONARQUE, under Louis the Fourteenth; the gaudy

gilt furniture writhing under a sense of its own horror and

ugliness, with a nymph smirking at every angle and a dragon

mouthing on every claw. Unreal and monstrous art this, and fit

only for such periwigged pomposities as the nobility of France at

that time, but not at all fit for you or me. We do not want the

rich to possess more beautiful things but the poor to create more

beautiful things; for ever man is poor who cannot create. Nor

shall the art which you and I need be merely a purple robe woven by

a slave and thrown over the whitened body of some leprous king to

adorn or to conceal the sin of his luxury, but rather shall it be

the noble and beautiful expression of a people's noble and

beautiful life. Art shall be again the most glorious of all the

chords through which the spirit of a great nation finds its noblest

utterance.

All around you, I said, lie the conditions for a great artistic

movement for every great art. Let us think of one of them; a

sculptor, for instance.

If a modern sculptor were to come and say, 'Very well, but where

can one find subjects for sculpture out of men who wear frock-coats

and chimney-pot hats?' I would tell him to go to the docks of a

great city and watch the men loading or unloading the stately

ships, working at wheel or windlass, hauling at rope or gangway. I

have never watched a man do anything useful who has not been

graceful at some moment of his labour: it is only the loafer and

the idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the

artist as he is to himself. I would ask the sculptor to go with me

to any of your schools or universities, to the running ground and

gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race, hurling quoit

or club, kneeling to tie their shoes before leaping, stepping from

the boat or bending to the oar, and to carve them; and when he was

weary of cities I would ask him to come to your fields and meadows

to watch the reaper with his sickle and the cattle-driver with

lifted lasso. For if a man cannot find the noblest motives for his

art in such simple daily things as a woman drawing water from the

well or a man leaning with his scythe, he will not find them

anywhere at all. Gods and goddesses the Greek carved because he

loved them; saint and king the Goth because he believed in them.

But you, you do not care much for Greek gods and goddesses, and you

are perfectly and entirely right; and you do not think much of

kings either, and you are quite right. But what you do love are

your own men and women, your own flowers and fields, your own hills

and mountains, and these are what your art should represent to you.

Ours has been the first movement which has brought the

handicraftsman and the artist together, for remember that by

separating the one from the other you do ruin to both; you rob the

one of all spiritual motive and all imaginative joy, you isolate

the other from all real technical perfection. The two greatest

schools of art in the world, the sculptor at Athens and the school

of painting at Venice, had their origin entirely in a long

succession of simple and earnest handicraftsmen. It was the Greek

potter who taught the sculptor that restraining influence of design

which was the glory of the Parthenon; it was the Italian decorator

of chests and household goods who kept Venetian painting always

true to its primary pictorial condition of noble colour. For we

should remember that all the arts are fine arts and all the arts

decorative arts. The greatest triumph of Italian painting was the

decoration of a pope's chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in

Venice. Michael Angelo wrought the one, and Tintoret, the dyer's

son, the other. And the little 'Dutch landscape, which you put

over your sideboard to-day, and between the windows to-morrow, is'

no less a glorious 'piece of work than the extents of field and

forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once

melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,' as Ruskin says.

Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese, Italian or

English; but their artistic spirit of design and their artistic

attitude to-day, their own world, you should absorb but imitate

never, copy never. Unless you can make as beautiful a design in

painted china or embroidered screen or beaten brass out of your

American turkey as the Japanese does out of his grey silver-winged

stork, you will never do anything. Let the Greek carve his lions

and the Goth his dragons: buffalo and wild deer are the animals

for you.

Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that cover your

valleys in the spring and your hills in the autumn: let them be

the flowers for your art. Not merely has Nature given you the

noblest motives for a new school of decoration, but to you above

all other countries has she given the utensils to work in.

You have quarries of marble richer than Pentelicus, more varied

than Paros, but do not build a great white square house of marble

and think that it is beautiful, or that you are using marble nobly.

If you build in marble you must either carve it into joyous

decoration, like the lives of dancing children that adorn the

marble castles of the Loire, or fill it with beautiful sculpture,

frieze and pediment, as the Greeks did, or inlay it with other

coloured marbles as they did in Venice. Otherwise you had better

build in simple red brick as your Puritan fathers, with no pretence

and with some beauty. Do not treat your marble as if it was

ordinary stone and build a house of mere blocks of it. For it is

indeed a precious stone, this marble of yours, and only workmen of

nobility of invention and delicacy of hand should be allowed to

touch it at all, carving it into noble statues or into beautiful

decoration, or inlaying it with other coloured marbles: for 'the

true colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and I

would fain see them taken advantage of to the full. Every variety

is here, from pale yellow to purple passing through orange, red,

and brown, entirely at your command; nearly every kind of green and

grey also is attainable, and with these and with pure white what

harmony might you not achieve. Of stained and variegated stone the

quantity is unlimited, the kinds innumerable. Were brighter

colours required, let glass, and gold protected by glass, be used

in mosaic, a kind of work as durable as the solid stone and

incapable of losing its lustre by time. And let the painter's work

be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber.

'This is the true and faithful way of building. Where this cannot

be, the device of external colouring may indeed be employed without

dishonour - but it must be with the warning reflection that a time

will come when such aids will pass away and when the building will

be judged in its lifelessness, dying the death of the dolphin.

Better the less bright, more enduring fabric. The transparent

alabasters of San Miniato and the mosaics of Saint Mark's are more

warmly filled and more brightly touched by every return of morning

and evening, while the hues of the Gothic cathedrals have died like

the iris out of the cloud, and the temples, whose azure and purple

once flamed above the Grecian promontory, stand in their faded

whiteness like snows which the sunset has left cold.' - Ruskin,

SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE, II.

I do not know anything so perfectly commonplace in design as most

modern jewellery. How easy for you to change that and to produce

goldsmiths' work that would be a joy to all of us. The gold is

ready for you in unexhausted treasure, stored up in the mountain

hollow or strewn on the river sand, and was not given to you merely

for barren speculation. There should be some better record of it

left in your history than the merchant's panic and the ruined home.

We do not remember often enough how constantly the history of a

great nation will live in and by its art. Only a few thin wreaths

of beaten gold remain to tell us of the stately empire of Etruria;

and, while from the streets of Florence the noble knight and

haughty duke have long since passed away, the gates which the

simple goldsmith Ghiberti made for their pleasure still guard their

lovely house of baptism, worthy still of the praise of Michael

Angelo who called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise.

Have then your school of design, search out your workmen and, when

you find one who has delicacy of hand and that wonder of invention

necessary for goldsmiths' work, do not leave him to toil in

obscurity and dishonour and have a great glaring shop and two great

glaring shop-boys in it (not to take your orders: they never do

that; but to force you to buy something you do not want at all).

When you want a thing wrought in gold, goblet or shield for the

feast, necklace or wreath for the women, tell him what you like

most in decoration, flower or wreath, bird in flight or hound in

the chase, image of the woman you love or the friend you honour.

Watch him as he beats out the gold into those thin plates delicate

as the petals of a yellow rose, or draws it into the long wires

like tangled sunbeams at dawn. Whoever that workman be, help him,

cherish him, and you will have such lovely work from his hand as

will be a joy to you for all time.

This is the spirit of our movement in England, and this is the

spirit in which we would wish you to work, making eternal by your

art all that is noble in your men and women, stately in your lakes

and mountains, beautiful in your own flowers and natural life. We

want to see that you have nothing in your houses that has not been

a joy to the man who made it, and is not a joy to those that use

it. We want to see you create an art made by the hands of the

people to please the hearts of the people too. Do you like this

spirit or not? Do you think it simple and strong, noble in its

aim, and beautiful in its result? I know you do.

Folly and slander have their own way for a little time, but for a

little time only. You now know what we mean: you will be able to

estimate what is said of us - its value and its motive.

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed

to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random

writing it would be impossible to overestimate - not to the artist

but to the public, blinding them to all, but harming the artist not

at all. Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but

at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to

judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way

he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a

poet by the colour of his neck-tie. I said there should be a law,

but there is really no necessity for a new law: nothing could be

easier than to bring the ordinary critic under the head of the

criminal classes. But let us leave such an inartistic subject and

return to beautiful and comely things, remembering that the art

which would represent the spirit of modern newspapers would be

exactly the art which you and I want to avoid - grotesque art,

malice mocking you from every gateway, slander sneering at you from

every corner.

Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the

workman. You have heard of me, I fear, through the medium of your

somewhat imaginative newspapers as, if not a 'Japanese young man,'

at least a young man to whom the rush and clamour and reality of

the modern world were distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in

life was the difficulty of living up to the level of his blue china

- a paradox from which England has not yet recovered.

Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an

artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what

beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful

things they might create.

One summer afternoon in Oxford - 'that sweet city with her dreaming

spires,' lovely as Venice in its splendour, noble in its learning

as Rome, down the long High Street that winds from tower to tower,

past silent cloister and stately gateway, till it reaches that

long, grey seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used

to, I say, because they are now pulling it down to build a tramway

and a light cast-iron bridge in its place, desecrating the

loveliest city in England) - well, we were coming down the street -

a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going

to river or tennis-court or cricket-field - when Ruskin going up to

lecture in cap and gown met us. He seemed troubled and prayed us

to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and

there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that

it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and

strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on

cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if

one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score,

a cane-handled bat. He thought, he said, that we should be working

at something that would do good to other people, at something by

which we might show that in all labour there was something noble.

Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he

wished. So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper

and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so

that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without

many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked us

to help him to make a road across this morass for these village

people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to

lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank

- a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the

mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our

enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it

much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked

away for two months at our road. And what became of the road?

Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly - in the middle of the

swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for the next

term there was no leader, and the 'diggers,' as they called us,

fell asunder. And I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst

the young men to go out to such work as road-making for the sake of

a noble ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic

movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England.

So I sought them out - leader they would call me - but there was no

leader: we were all searchers only and we were bound to each other

by noble friendship and by noble art. There was none of us idle:

poets most of us, so ambitious were we: painters some of us, or

workers in metal or modellers, determined that we would try and

create for ourselves beautiful work: for the handicraftsman

beautiful work, for those who love us poems and pictures, for those

who love us not epigrams and paradoxes and scorn.

Well, we have done something in England and we will do something

more. Now, I do not want you, believe me, to ask your brilliant

young men, your beautiful young girls, to go out and make a road on

a swamp for any village in America, but I think you might each of

you have some art to practise.

We must have, as Emerson said, a mechanical craft for our culture,

a basis for our higher accomplishments in the work of our hands -

the uselessness of most people's hands seems to me one of the most

unpractical things. 'No separation from labour can be without some

loss of power or truth to the seer,' says Emerson again. The

heroism which would make on us the impression of Epaminondas must

be that of a domestic conqueror. The hero of the future is he who

shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of fashion and of

convention.

When you have chosen your own part, abide by it, and do not weakly

try and reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be

the common nor the common the heroic. Congratulate yourself if you

have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony

of a decorous age.

And lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which Death

cannot harm. The little house at Concord may be desolate, but the

wisdom of New England's Plato is not silenced nor the brilliancy of

that Attic genius dimmed: the lips of Longfellow are still musical

for us though his dust be turning into the flowers which he loved:

and as it is with the greater artists, poet and philosopher and

song-bird, so let it be with you.

LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS

IN the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to-

night I do not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty

at all. For we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of

beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to

isolate it in a formula appealing to the intellect, we, on the

contrary, seek to materialise it in a form that gives joy to the

soul through the senses. We want to create it, not to define it.

The definition should follow the work: the work should not adapt

itself to the definition.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any

conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into

weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the

ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality. You must find it

in life and re-create it in art.

While, then, on the one hand I do not desire to give you any

philosophy of beauty - for, what I want to-night is to investigate

how we can create art, not how we can talk of it - on the other

hand, I do not wish to deal with anything like a history of English

art.

To begin with, such an expression as English art is a meaningless

expression. One might just as well talk of English mathematics.

Art is the science of beauty, and Mathematics the science of truth:

there is no national school of either. Indeed, a national school

is a provincial school, merely. Nor is there any such thing as a

school of art even. There are merely artists, that is all.

And as regards histories of art, they are quite valueless to you

unless you are seeking the ostentatious oblivion of an art

professorship. It is of no use to you to know the date of Perugino

or the birthplace of Salvator Rosa: all that you should learn

about art is to know a good picture when you see it, and a bad

picture when you see it. As regards the date of the artist, all

good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a

portrait of Velasquez - they are always modern, always of our

time. And as regards the nationality of the artist, art is not

national but universal. As regards archaeology, then, avoid it

altogether: archaeology is merely the science of making excuses

for bad art; it is the rock on which many a young artist founders

and shipwrecks; it is the abyss from which no artist, old or young,

ever returns. Or, if he does return, he is so covered with the

dust of ages and the mildew of time, that he is quite

unrecognisable as an artist, and has to conceal himself for the

rest of his days under the cap of a professor, or as a mere

illustrator of ancient history. How worthless archaeology is in

art you can estimate by the fact of its being so popular.

Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art.

Whatever is popular is wrong.

As I am not going to talk to you, then, about the philosophy of the

beautiful, or the history of art, you will ask me what I am going

to talk about. The subject of my lecture to-night is what makes an

artist and what does the artist make; what are the relations of the

artist to his surroundings, what is the education the artist should

get, and what is the quality of a good work of art.

Now, as regards the relations of the artist to his surroundings, by

which I mean the age and country in which he is born. All good

art, as I said before, has nothing to do with any particular

century; but this universality is the quality of the work of art;

the conditions that produce that quality are different. And what,

I think, you should do is to realise completely your age in order

completely to abstract yourself from it; remembering that if you

are an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century,

but the master of eternity, that all art rests on a principle, and

that mere temporal considerations are no principle at all; and that

those who advise you to make your art representative of the

nineteenth century are advising you to produce an art which your

children, when you have them, will think old-fashioned. But you

will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic

people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of

ours.

Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But

remember that there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic

people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always

been, and will always be, an exquisite exception. There is no

golden age of art; only artists who have produced what is more

golden than gold.

WHAT, you will say to me, the Greeks? were not they an artistic

people?

Well, the Greeks certainly not, but, perhaps, you mean the

Athenians, the citizens of one out of a thousand cities.

Do you think that they were an artistic people? Take them even at

the time of their highest artistic development, the latter part of

the fifth century before Christ, when they had the greatest poets

and the greatest artists of the antique world, when the Parthenon

rose in loveliness at the bidding of a Phidias, and the philosopher

spake of wisdom in the shadow of the painted portico, and tragedy

swept in the perfection of pageant and pathos across the marble of

the stage. Were they an artistic people then? Not a bit of it.

What is an artistic people but a people who love their artists and

understand their art? The Athenians could do neither.

How did they treat Phidias? To Phidias we owe the great era, not

merely in Greek, but in all art - I mean of the introduction of the

use of the living model.

And what would you say if all the English bishops, backed by the

English people, came down from Exeter Hall to the Royal Academy one

day and took off Sir Frederick Leighton in a prison van to Newgate

on the charge of having allowed you to make use of the living model

in your designs for sacred pictures?

Would you not cry out against the barbarism and the Puritanism of

such an idea? Would you not explain to them that the worst way to

honour God is to dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the

work of His hands; and, that if one wants to paint Christ one must

take the most Christlike person one can find, and if one wants to

paint the Madonna, the purest girl one knows?

Would you not rush off and burn down Newgate, if necessary, and say

that such a thing was without parallel in history?

Without parallel? Well, that is exactly what the Athenians did.

In the room of the Parthenon marbles, in the British Museum, you

will see a marble shield on the wall. On it there are two figures;

one of a man whose face is half hidden, the other of a man with the

godlike lineaments of Pericles. For having done this, for having

introduced into a bas relief, taken from Greek sacred history, the

image of the great statesman who was ruling Athens at the time,

Phidias was flung into prison and there, in the common gaol of

Athens, died, the supreme artist of the old world.

And do you think that this was an exceptional case? The sign of a

Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art, and this cry

was raised by the Athenian people against every great poet and

thinker of their day - AEschylus, Euripides, Socrates. It was the

same with Florence in the thirteenth century. Good handicrafts are

due to guilds, not to the people. The moment the guilds lost their

power and the people rushed in, beauty and honesty of work died.

And so, never talk of an artistic people; there never has been such

a thing.

But, perhaps, you will tell me that the external beauty of the

world has almost entirely passed away from us, that the artist

dwells no longer in the midst of the lovely surroundings which, in

ages past, were the natural inheritance of every one, and that art

is very difficult in this unlovely town of ours, where, as you go

to your work in the morning, or return from it at eventide, you

have to pass through street after street of the most foolish and

stupid architecture that the world has ever seen; architecture,

where every lovely Greek form is desecrated and defiled, and every

lovely Gothic form defiled and desecrated, reducing three-fourths

of the London houses to being, merely, like square boxes of the

vilest proportions, as gaunt as they are grimy, and as poor as they

are pretentious - the hall door always of the wrong colour, and the

windows of the wrong size, and where, even when wearied of the

houses you turn to contemplate the street itself, you have nothing

to look at but chimney-pot hats, men with sandwich boards,

vermilion letter-boxes, and do that even at the risk of being run

over by an emerald-green omnibus.

Is not art difficult, you will say to me, in such surroundings as

these? Of course it is difficult, but then art was never easy; you

yourselves would not wish it to be easy; and, besides, nothing is

worth doing except what the world says is impossible.

Still, you do not care to be answered merely by a paradox. What

are the relations of the artist to the external world, and what is

the result of the loss of beautiful surroundings to you, is one of

the most important questions of modern art; and there is no point

on which Mr. Ruskin so insists as that the decadence of art has

come from the decadence of beautiful things; and that when the

artist cannot feed his eye on beauty, beauty goes from his work.

I remember in one of his lectures, after describing the sordid

aspect of a great English city, he draws for us a picture of what

were the artistic surroundings long ago.

Think, he says, in words of perfect and picturesque imagery, whose

beauty I can but feebly echo, think of what was the scene which

presented itself, in his afternoon walk, to a designer of the

Gothic school of Pisa - Nino Pisano or any of his men (22):

On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line of brighter

palaces, arched and pillared, and inlaid with deep red porphyry,

and with serpentine; along the quays before their gates were riding

troops of knights, noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and

shield; horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and gleaming

light - the purple, and silver, and scarlet fringes flowing over

the strong limbs and clashing mall, like sea-waves over rocks at

sunset. Opening on each side from the river were gardens, courts,

and cloisters; long successions of white pillars among wreaths of

vine; leaping of fountains through buds of pomegranate and orange:

and still along the garden-paths, and under and through the crimson

of the pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, groups of the fairest

women that Italy ever saw - fairest, because purest and

thoughtfullest; trained in all high knowledge, as in all courteous

art - in dance, in song, in sweet wit, in lofty learning, in

loftier courage, in loftiest love - able alike to cheer, to

enchant, or save, the souls of men. Above all this scenery of

perfect human life, rose dome and bell-tower, burning with white

alabaster and gold: beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of

mighty hills hoary with olive; far in the north, above a purple sea

of peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear, sharp-cloven Carrara

mountains sent up their steadfast flames of marble summit into

amber sky; the great sea itself, scorching with expanse of light,

stretching from their feet to the Gorgonian isles; and over all

these, ever present, near or far - seen through the leaves of vine,

or imaged with all its march of clouds in the Arno's stream, or set

with its depth of blue close against the golden hair and burning

cheek of lady and knight, - that untroubled and sacred sky, which

was to all men, in those days of innocent faith, indeed the

unquestioned abode of spirits, as the earth was of men; and which

opened straight through its gates of cloud and veils of dew into

the awfulness of the eternal world; - a heaven in which every cloud

that passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every ray of

its Evening and Morning streamed from the throne of God.

What think you of that for a school of design?

And then look at the depressing, monotonous appearance of any

modern city, the sombre dress of men and women, the meaningless and

barren architecture, the colourless and dreadful surroundings.

Without a beautiful national life, not sculpture merely, but all

the arts will die.

Well, as regards the religious feeling of the close of the passage,

I do not think I need speak about that. Religion springs from

religious feeling, art from artistic feeling: you never get one

from the other; unless you have the right root you will not get the

right flower; and, if a man sees in a cloud the chariot of an

angel, he will probably paint it very unlike a cloud.

But, as regards the general idea of the early part of that lovely

bit of prose, is it really true that beautiful surroundings are

necessary for the artist? I think not; I am sure not. Indeed, to

me the most inartistic thing in this age of ours is not the

indifference of the public to beautiful things, but the

indifference of the artist to the things that are called ugly.

For, to the real artist, nothing is beautiful or ugly in itself at

all. With the facts of the object he has nothing to do, but with

its appearance only, and appearance is a matter of light and shade,

of masses, of position, and of value.

Appearance is, in fact, a matter of effect merely, and it is with

the effects of nature that you have to deal, not with the real

condition of the object. What you, as painters, have to paint is

not things as they are but things as they seem to be, not things as

they are but things as they are not.

No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions of light and

shade, or proximity to other things, it will not look beautiful; no

object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not

look ugly. I believe that in every twenty-four hours what is

beautiful looks ugly, and what is ugly looks beautiful, once.

And, the commonplace character of so much of our English painting

seems to me due to the fact that so many of our young artists look

merely at what we may call 'ready-made beauty,' whereas you exist

as artists not to copy beauty but to create it in your art, to wait

and watch for it in nature.

What would you say of a dramatist who would take nobody but

virtuous people as characters in his play? Would you not say he

was missing half of life? Well, of the young artist who paints

nothing but beautiful things, I say he misses one half of the

world.

Do not wait for life to be picturesque, but try and see life under

picturesque conditions. These conditions you can create for

yourself in your studio, for they are merely conditions of light.

In nature, you must wait for them, watch for them, choose them;

and, if you wait and watch, come they will.

In Gower Street at night you may see a letter-box that is

picturesque: on the Thames Embankment you may see picturesque

policemen. Even Venice is not always beautiful, nor France.

To paint what you see is a good rule in art, but to see what is

worth painting is better. See life under pictorial conditions. It

is better to live in a city of changeable weather than in a city of

lovely surroundings.

Now, having seen what makes the artist, and what the artist makes,

who is the artist? There is a man living amongst us who unites in

himself all the qualities of the noblest art, whose work is a joy

for all time, who is, himself, a master of all time. That man is

Mr. Whistler.

* * * * * * * *

But, you will say, modern dress, that is bad. If you cannot paint

black cloth you could not have painted silken doublet. Ugly dress

is better for art - facts of vision, not of the object.

What is a picture? Primarily, a picture is a beautifully coloured

surface, merely, with no more spiritual message or meaning for you

than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from

the wall of Damascus. It is, primarily, a purely decorative thing,

a delight to look at.

All archaeological pictures that make you say 'How curious!' all

sentimental pictures that make you say, 'How sad!' all historical

pictures that make you say 'How interesting!' all pictures that do

not immediately give you such artistic joy as to make you say 'How

beautiful!' are bad pictures.

* * * * * * * *

We never know what an artist is going to do. Of course not. The

artist is not a specialist. All such divisions as animal painters,

landscape painters, painters of Scotch cattle in an English mist,

painters of English cattle in a Scotch mist, racehorse painters,

bull-terrier painters, all are shallow. If a man is an artist he

can paint everything.

The object of art is to stir the most divine and remote of the

chords which make music in our soul; and colour is indeed, of

itself a mystical presence on things, and tone a kind of sentinel.

Am I pleading, then, for mere technique? No. As long as there are

any signs of technique at all, the picture is unfinished. What is

finish? A picture is finished when all traces of work, and of the

means employed to bring about the result, have disappeared.

In the case of handicraftsmen - the weaver, the potter, the smith -

on their work are the traces of their hand. But it is not so with

the painter; it is not so with the artist.

Art should have no sentiment about it but its beauty, no technique

except what you cannot observe. One should be able to say of a

picture not that it is 'well painted,' but that it is 'not

painted.'

What is the difference between absolutely decorative art and a

painting? Decorative art emphasises its material: imaginative art

annihilates it. Tapestry shows its threads as part of its beauty:

a picture annihilates its canvas: it shows nothing of it.

Porcelain emphasises its glaze: water-colours reject the paper.

A picture has no meaning but its beauty, no message but its joy.

That is the first truth about art that you must never lose sight

of. A picture is a purely decorative thing.

LONDON MODELS

PROFESSIONAL models are a purely modern invention. To the Greeks,

for instance, they were quite unknown. Mr. Mahaffy, it is true,

tells us that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies

of Athenian society in order to induce them to sit to his friend

Phidias, and we know that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of

the Trojan women the face of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the

great Conservative leader of the day, but these GRANDES DAMES

clearly do not come under our category. As for the old masters,

they undoubtedly made constant studies from their pupils and

apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the

portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to

have had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of

people whose sole profession is to pose. In fact the model, in our

sense of the word, is the direct creation of Academic Schools.

Every country now has its own models, except America. In New York,

and even in Boston, a good model is so great a rarity that most of

the artists are reduced to painting Niagara and millionaires. In

Europe, however, it is different. Here we have plenty of models,

and of every nationality. The Italian models are the best. The

natural grace of their attitudes, as well as the wonderful

picturesqueness of their colouring, makes them facile - often too

facile - subjects for the painter's brush. The French models,

though not so beautiful as the Italian, possess a quickness of

intellectual sympathy, a capacity, in fact, of understanding the

artist, which is quite remarkable. They have also a great command

over the varieties of facial expression, are peculiarly dramatic,

and can chatter the ARGOT of the ATELIER as cleverly as the critic

of the GIL BLAS. The English models form a class entirely by

themselves. They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so

clever as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to

speak, of their order. Now and then some old veteran knocks at the

studio door, and proposes to sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or

as King Lear upon the blasted heath. One of them some time ago

called on a popular painter who, happening at the moment to require

his services, engaged him, and told him to begin by kneeling down

in the attitude of prayer. 'Shall I be Biblical or Shakespearean,

sir?' asked the veteran. 'Well - Shakespearean,' answered the

artist, wondering by what subtle nuance of expression the model

would convey the difference. 'All right, sir,' said the professor

of posing, and he solemnly knelt down and began to wink with his

left eye! This class, however, is dying out. As a rule the model,

nowadays, is a pretty girl, from about twelve to twenty-five years

of age, who knows nothing about art, cares less, and is merely

anxious to earn seven or eight shillings a day without much

trouble. English models rarely look at a picture, and never

venture on any aesthetic theories. In fact, they realise very

completely Mr. Whistler's idea of the function of an art critic,

for they pass no criticisms at all. They accept all schools of art

with the grand catholicity of the auctioneer, and sit to a

fantastic young impressionist as readily as to a learned and

laborious academician. They are neither for the Whistlerites nor

against them; the quarrel between the school of facts and the

school of effects touches them not; idealistic and naturalistic are

words that convey no meaning to their ears; they merely desire that

the studio shall be warm, and the lunch hot, for all charming

artists give their models lunch.

As to what they are asked to do they are equally indifferent. On

Monday they will don the rags of a beggar-girl for Mr. Pumper,

whose pathetic pictures of modern life draw such tears from the

public, and on Tuesday they will pose in a peplum for Mr. Phoebus,

who thinks that all really artistic subjects are necessarily B.C.

They career gaily through all centuries and through all costumes,

and, like actors, are interesting only when they are not

themselves. They are extremely good-natured, and very

accommodating. 'What do you sit for?' said a young artist to a

model who had sent him in her card (all models, by the way, have

cards and a small black bag). 'Oh, for anything you like, sir,'

said the girl, 'landscape if necessary!'

Intellectually, it must be acknowledged, they are Philistines, but

physically they are perfect - at least some are. Though none of

them can talk Greek, many can look Greek, which to a nineteenth-

century painter is naturally of great importance. If they are

allowed, they chatter a great deal, but they never say anything.

Their observations are the only BANALITES heard in Bohemia.

However, though they cannot appreciate the artist as artist, they

are quite ready to appreciate the artist as a man. They are very

sensitive to kindness, respect and generosity. A beautiful model

who had sat for two years to one of our most distinguished English

painters, got engaged to a street vendor of penny ices.

On her marriage the painter sent her a pretty wedding present, and

received in return a nice letter of thanks with the following

remarkable postscript: 'Never eat the green ices!'

When they are tired a wise artist gives them a rest. Then they sit

in a chair and read penny dreadfuls, till they are roused from the

tragedy of literature to take their place again in the tragedy of

art. A few of them smoke cigarettes. This, however, is regarded

by the other models as showing a want of seriousness, and is not

generally approved of. They are engaged by the day and by the

half-day. The tariff is a shilling an hour, to which great artists

usually add an omnibus fare. The two best things about them are

their extraordinary prettiness, and their extreme respectability.

As a class they are very well behaved, particularly those who sit

for the figure, a fact which is curious or natural according to the

view one takes of human nature. They usually marry well, and

sometimes they marry the artist. For an artist to marry his model

is as fatal as for a GOURMET to marry his cook: the one gets no

sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

On the whole the English female models are very naive, very

natural, and very good-humoured. The virtues which the artist

values most in them are prettiness and punctuality. Every sensible

model consequently keeps a diary of her engagements, and dresses

neatly. The bad season is, of course, the summer, when the artists

are out of town. However, of late years some artists have engaged

their models to follow them, and the wife of one of our most

charming painters has often had three or four models under her

charge in the country, so that the work of her husband and his

friends should not be interrupted. In France the models migrate EN

MASSE to the little seaport villages or forest hamlets where the

painters congregate. The English models, however, wait patiently

in London, as a rule, till the artists come back. Nearly all of

them live with their parents, and help to support the house. They

have every qualification for being immortalised in art except that

of beautiful hands. The hands of the English model are nearly

always coarse and red.

As for the male models, there is the veteran whom we have mentioned

above. He has all the traditions of the grand style, and is

rapidly disappearing with the school he represents. An old man who

talks about Fuseli is, of course, unendurable, and, besides,

patriarchs have ceased to be fashionable subjects. Then there is

the true Academy model. He is usually a man of thirty, rarely

good-looking, but a perfect miracle of muscles. In fact he is the

apotheosis of anatomy, and is so conscious of his own splendour

that he tells you of his tibia and his thorax, as if no one else

had anything of the kind. Then come the Oriental models. The

supply of these is limited, but there are always about a dozen in

London. They are very much sought after as they can remain

immobile for hours, and generally possess lovely costumes.

However, they have a very poor opinion of English art, which they

regard as something between a vulgar personality and a commonplace

photograph. Next we have the Italian youth who has come over

specially to be a model, or takes to it when his organ is out of

repair. He is often quite charming with his large melancholy eyes,

his crisp hair, and his slim brown figure. It is true he eats

garlic, but then he can stand like a faun and couch like a leopard,

so he is forgiven. He is always full of pretty compliments, and

has been known to have kind words of encouragement for even our

greatest artists. As for the English lad of the same age, he never

sits at all. Apparently he does not regard the career of a model

as a serious profession. In any case he is rarely, if ever, to be

got hold of. English boys, too, are difficult to find. Sometimes

an ex-model who has a son will curl his hair, and wash his face,

and bring him the round of the studios, all soap and shininess.

The young school don't like him, but the older school do, and when

he appears on the walls of the Royal Academy he is called THE

INFANT SAMUEL. Occasionally also an artist catches a couple of

GAMINS in the gutter and asks them to come to his studio. The

first time they always appear, but after that they don't keep their

appointments. They dislike sitting still, and have a strong and

perhaps natural objection to looking pathetic. Besides, they are

always under the impression that the artist is laughing at them.

It is a sad fact, but there is no doubt that the poor are

completely unconscious of their own picturesqueness. Those of them

who can be induced to sit do so with the idea that the artist is

merely a benevolent philanthropist who has chosen an eccentric

method of distributing alms to the undeserving. Perhaps the School

Board will teach the London GAMIN his own artistic value, and then

they will be better models than they are now. One remarkable

privilege belongs to the Academy model, that of extorting a

sovereign from any newly elected Associate or R.A. They wait at

Burlington House till the announcement is made, and then race to

the hapless artist's house. The one who arrives first receives the

money. They have of late been much troubled at the long distances

they have had to run, and they look with disfavour on the election

of artists who live at Hampstead or at Bedford Park, for it is

considered a point of honour not to employ the underground railway,

omnibuses, or any artificial means of locomotion. The race is to

the swift.

Besides the professional posers of the studio there are posers of

the Row, the posers at afternoon teas, the posers in politics and

the circus posers. All four classes are delightful, but only the

last class is ever really decorative. Acrobats and gymnasts can

give the young painter infinite suggestions, for they bring into

their art an element of swiftness of motion and of constant change

that the studio model necessarily lacks. What is interesting in

these 'slaves of the ring' is that with them Beauty is an

unconscious result not a conscious aim, the result in fact of the

mathematical calculation of curves and distances, of absolute

precision of eye, of the scientific knowledge of the equilibrium of

forces, and of perfect physical training. A good acrobat is always

graceful, though grace is never his object; he is graceful because

he does what he has to do in the best way in which it can be done -

graceful because he is natural. If an ancient Greek were to come

to life now, which considering the probable severity of his

criticisms would be rather trying to our conceit, he would be found

far oftener at the circus than at the theatre. A good circus is an

oasis of Hellenism in a world that reads too much to be wise, and

thinks too much to be beautiful. If it were not for the running-

ground at Eton, the towing-path at Oxford, the Thames swimming-

baths, and the yearly circuses, humanity would forget the plastic

perfection of its own form, and degenerate into a race of short-

sighted professors and spectacled PRECIEUSES. Not that the circus

proprietors are, as a rule, conscious of their high mission. Do

they not bore us with the HAUTE ECOLE, and weary us with

Shakespearean clowns? Still, at least, they give us acrobats, and

the acrobat is an artist. The mere fact that he never speaks to

the audience shows how well he appreciates the great truth that the

aim of art is not to reveal personality but to please. The clown

may be blatant, but the acrobat is always beautiful. He is an

interesting combination of the spirit of Greek sculpture with the

spangles of the modern costumier. He has even had his niche in the

novels of our age, and if MANETTE SALOMON be the unmasking of the

model, LES FRERES ZEMGANNO is the apotheosis of the acrobat.

As regards the influence of the ordinary model on our English

school of painting, it cannot be said that it is altogether good.

It is, of course, an advantage for the young artist sitting in his

studio to be able to isolate 'a little corner of life,' as the

French say, from disturbing surroundings, and to study it under

certain effects of light and shade. But this very isolation leads

often to mere mannerism in the painter, and robs him of that broad

acceptance of the general facts of life which is the very essence

of art. Model-painting, in a word, while it may be the condition

of art, is not by any means its aim.

It is simply practice, not perfection. Its use trains the eye and

the hand of the painter, its abuse produces in his work an effect

of mere posing and prettiness. It is the secret of much of the

artificiality of modern art, this constant posing of pretty people,

and when art becomes artificial it becomes monotonous. Outside the

little world of the studio, with its draperies and its BRIC-E-BRAC,

lies the world of life with its infinite, its Shakespearean

variety. We must, however, distinguish between the two kinds of

models, those who sit for the figure and those who sit for the

costume. The study of the first is always excellent, but the

costume-model is becoming rather wearisome in modern pictures. It

is really of very little use to dress up a London girl in Greek

draperies and to paint her as a goddess. The robe may be the robe

of Athens, but the face is usually the face of Brompton. Now and

then, it is true, one comes across a model whose face is an

exquisite anachronism, and who looks lovely and natural in the

dress of any century but her own. This, however, is rather rare.

As a rule models are absolutely DE NOTRE SIECLE, and should be

painted as such. Unfortunately they are not, and, as a

consequence, we are shown every year a series of scenes from fancy

dress balls which are called historical pictures, but are little

more than mediocre representations of modern people masquerading.

In France they are wiser. The French painter uses the model simply

for study; for the finished picture he goes direct to life.

However, we must not blame the sitters for the shortcomings of the

artists. The English models are a well-behaved and hard-working

class, and if they are more interested in artists than in art, a

large section of the public is in the same condition, and most of

our modern exhibitions seem to justify its choice.

POEMS IN PROSE

THE ARTIST

ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image

of THE PLEASURE THAT ABIDETH FOR A MOMENT. And he went forth into

the world to look for bronze. For he could think only in bronze.

But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere

in the whole world was there any bronze to be found, save only the

bronze of the image of THE SORROW THAT ENDURETH FOR EVER.

Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned,

and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life.

On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set this

image of his own fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the

love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that

endureth for ever. And in the whole world there was no other

bronze save the bronze of this image.

And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great

furnace, and gave it to the fire.

And out of the bronze of the image of THE SORROW THAT ENDURETH FOR

EVER he fashioned an image of THE PLEASURE THAT ABIDETH FOR A

MOMENT.

THE DOER OF GOOD

It was night-time and He was alone.

And He saw afar-off the walls of a round city and went towards the

city.

And when He came near He heard within the city the tread of the

feet of joy, and the laughter of the mouth of gladness and the loud

noise of many lutes. And He knocked at the gate and certain of the

gate-keepers opened to Him.

And He beheld a house that was of marble and had fair pillars of

marble before it. The pillars were hung with garlands, and within

and without there were torches of cedar. And He entered the house.

And when He had passed through the hall of chalcedony and the hall

of jasper, and reached the long hall of feasting, He saw lying on a

couch of sea-purple one whose hair was crowned with red roses and

whose lips were red with wine.

And He went behind him and touched him on the shoulder and said to

him, 'Why do you live like this?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him, and made answer

and said, 'But I was a leper once, and you healed me. How else

should I live?'

And He passed out of the house and went again into the street.

And after a little while He saw one whose face and raiment were

painted and whose feet were shod with pearls. And behind her came,

slowly as a hunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours.

Now the face of the woman was as the fair face of an idol, and the

eyes of the young man were bright with lust.

And He followed swiftly and touched the hand of the young man and

said to him, 'Why do you look at this woman and in such wise?'

And the young man turned round and recognised Him and said, 'But I

was blind once, and you gave me sight. At what else should I

look?'

And He ran forward and touched the painted raiment of the woman and

said to her, 'Is there no other way in which to walk save the way

of sin?'

And the woman turned round and recognised Him, and laughed and

said, 'But you forgave me my sins, and the way is a pleasant way.'

And He passed out of the city.

And when He had passed out of the city He saw seated by the

roadside a young man who was weeping.

And He went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and

said to him, 'Why are you weeping?'

And the young man looked up and recognised Him and made answer,

'But I was dead once, and you raised me from the dead. What else

should I do but weep?'

THE DISCIPLE

When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of

sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping

through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it

comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet

waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of

their hair and cried to the pool and said, 'We do not wonder that

you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was

he.'

'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.

'Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. 'Us

did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your

banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he

would mirror his own beauty.'

And the pool answered, 'But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on

my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw

ever my own beauty mirrored.'

THE MASTER

Now when the darkness came over the earth Joseph of Arimathea,

having lighted a torch of pinewood, passed down from the hill into

the valley. For he had business in his own home.

And kneeling on the flint stones of the Valley of Desolation he saw

a young man who was naked and weeping. His hair was the colour of

honey, and his body was as a white flower, but he had wounded his

body with thorns and on his hair had he set ashes as a crown.

And he who had great possessions said to the young man who was

naked and weeping, 'I do not wonder that your sorrow is so great,

for surely He was a just man.'

And the young man answered, 'It is not for Him that I am weeping,

but for myself. I too have changed water into wine, and I have

healed the leper and given sight to the blind. I have walked upon

the waters, and from the dwellers in the tombs I have cast out

devils. I have fed the hungry in the desert where there was no

food, and I have raised the dead from their narrow houses, and at

my bidding, and before a great multitude, of people, a barren fig-

tree withered away. All things that this man has done I have done

also. And yet they have not crucified me.'

THE HOUSE OF JUDGMENT

And there was silence in the House of Judgment, and the Man came

naked before God.

And God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and thou hast

shown cruelty to those who were in need of succour, and to those

who lacked help thou hast been bitter and hard of heart. The poor

called to thee and thou didst not hearken, and thine ears were

closed to the cry of My afflicted. The inheritance of the

fatherless thou didst take unto thyself, and thou didst send the

foxes into the vineyard of thy neighbour's field. Thou didst take

the bread of the children and give it to the dogs to eat, and My

lepers who lived in the marshes, and were at peace and praised Me,

thou didst drive forth on to the highways, and on Mine earth out of

which I made thee thou didst spill innocent blood.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And again God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Thy life hath been evil, and the Beauty I

have shown thou hast sought for, and the Good I have hidden thou

didst pass by. The walls of thy chamber were painted with images,

and from the bed of thine abominations thou didst rise up to the

sound of flutes. Thou didst build seven altars to the sins I have

suffered, and didst eat of the thing that may not be eaten, and the

purple of thy raiment was broidered with the three signs of shame.

Thine idols were neither of gold nor of silver that endure, but of

flesh that dieth. Thou didst stain their hair with perfumes and

put pomegranates in their hands. Thou didst stain their feet with

saffron and spread carpets before them. With antimony thou didst

stain their eyelids and their bodies thou didst smear with myrrh.

Thou didst bow thyself to the ground before them, and the thrones

of thine idols were set in the sun. Thou didst show to the sun thy

shame and to the moon thy madness.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And a third time God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.

And God said to the Man, 'Evil hath been thy life, and with evil

didst thou requite good, and with wrongdoing kindness. The hands

that fed thee thou didst wound, and the breasts that gave thee suck

thou didst despise. He who came to thee with water went away

thirsting, and the outlawed men who hid thee in their tents at

night thou didst betray before dawn. Thine enemy who spared thee

thou didst snare in an ambush, and the friend who walked with thee

thou didst sell for a price, and to those who brought thee Love

thou didst ever give Lust in thy turn.'

And the Man made answer and said, 'Even so did I.'

And God closed the Book of the Life of the Man, and said, 'Surely I

will send thee into Hell. Even into Hell will I send thee.'

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not.'

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell,

and for what reason?'

'Because in Hell have I always lived,' answered the Man.

And there was silence in the House of Judgment.

And after a space God spake, and said to the Man, 'Seeing that I

may not send thee into Hell, surely I will send thee unto Heaven.

Even unto Heaven will I send thee.'

And the Man cried out, 'Thou canst not.'

And God said to the Man, 'Wherefore can I not send thee unto

Heaven, and for what reason?'

'Because never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it,'

answered the Man.

And there was silence in the House of Judgment.

THE TEACHER OF WISDOM

From his childhood he had been as one filled with the perfect

knowledge of God, and even while he was yet but a lad many of the

saints, as well as certain holy women who dwelt in the free city of

his birth, had been stirred to much wonder by the grave wisdom of

his answers.

And when his parents had given him the robe and the ring of manhood

he kissed them, and left them and went out into the world, that he

might speak to the world about God. For there were at that time

many in the world who either knew not God at all, or had but an

incomplete knowledge of Him, or worshipped the false gods who dwell

in groves and have no care of their worshippers.

And he set his face to the sun and journeyed, walking without

sandals, as he had seen the saints walk, and carrying at his girdle

a leathern wallet and a little water-bottle of burnt clay.

And as he walked along the highway he was full of the joy that

comes from the perfect knowledge of God, and he sang praises unto

God without ceasing; and after a time he reached a strange land in

which there were many cities.

And he passed through eleven cities. And some of these cities were

in valleys, and others were by the banks of great rivers, and

others were set on hills. And in each city he found a disciple who

loved him and followed him, and a great multitude also of people

followed him from each city, and the knowledge of God spread in the

whole land, and many of the rulers were converted, and the priests

of the temples in which there were idols found that half of their

gain was gone, and when they beat upon their drums at noon none, or

but a few, came with peacocks and with offerings of flesh as had

been the custom of the land before his coming.

Yet the more the people followed him, and the greater the number of

his disciples, the greater became his sorrow. And he knew not why

his sorrow was so great. For he spake ever about God, and out of

the fulness of that perfect knowledge of God which God had Himself

given to him.

And one evening he passed out of the eleventh city, which was a

city of Armenia, and his disciples and a great crowd of people

followed after him; and he went up on to a mountain and sat down on

a rock that was on the mountain, and his disciples stood round him,

and the multitude knelt in the valley.

And he bowed his head on his hands and wept, and said to his Soul,

'Why is it that I am full of sorrow and fear, and that each of my

disciples is an enemy that walks in the noonday?' And his Soul

answered him and said, 'God filled thee with the perfect knowledge

of Himself, and thou hast given this knowledge away to others. The

pearl of great price thou hast divided, and the vesture without

seam thou hast parted asunder. He who giveth away wisdom robbeth

himself. He is as one who giveth his treasure to a robber. Is not

God wiser than thou art? Who art thou to give away the secret that

God hath told thee? I was rich once, and thou hast made me poor.

Once I saw God, and now thou hast hidden Him from me.'

And he wept again, for he knew that his Soul spake truth to him,

and that he had given to others the perfect knowledge of God, and

that he was as one clinging to the skirts of God, and that his

faith was leaving him by reason of the number of those who believed

in him.

And he said to himself, 'I will talk no more about God. He who

giveth away wisdom robbeth himself.'

And after the space of some hours his disciples came near him and

bowed themselves to the ground and said, 'Master, talk to us about

God, for thou hast the perfect knowledge of God, and no man save

thee hath this knowledge.'

And he answered them and said, 'I will talk to you about all other

things that are in heaven and on earth, but about God I will not

talk to you. Neither now, nor at any time, will I talk to you

about God.'

And they were wroth with him and said to him, 'Thou hast led us

into the desert that we might hearken to thee. Wilt thou send us

away hungry, and the great multitude that thou hast made to follow

thee?'

And he answered them and said, 'I will not talk to you about God.'

And the multitude murmured against him and said to him, 'Thou hast

led us into the desert, and hast given us no food to eat. Talk to

us about God and it will suffice us.'

But he answered them not a word. For he knew that if he spake to

them about God he would give away his treasure.

And his disciples went away sadly, and the multitude of people

returned to their own homes. And many died on the way.

And when he was alone he rose up and set his face to the moon, and

journeyed for seven moons, speaking to no man nor making any

answer. And when the seventh moon had waned he reached that desert

which is the desert of the Great River. And having found a cavern

in which a Centaur had once dwelt, he took it for his place of

dwelling, and made himself a mat of reeds on which to lie, and

became a hermit. And every hour the Hermit praised God that He had

suffered him to keep some knowledge of Him and of His wonderful

greatness.

Now, one evening, as the Hermit was seated before the cavern in

which he had made his place of dwelling, he beheld a young man of

evil and beautiful face who passed by in mean apparel and with

empty hands. Every evening with empty hands the young man passed

by, and every morning he returned with his hands full of purple and

pearls. For he was a Robber and robbed the caravans of the

merchants.

And the Hermit looked at him and pitied him. But he spake not a

word. For he knew that he who speaks a word loses his faith.

And one morning, as the young man returned with his hands full of

purple and pearls, he stopped and frowned and stamped his foot upon

the sand, and said to the Hermit: 'Why do you look at me ever in

this manner as I pass by? What is it that I see in your eyes? For

no man has looked at me before in this manner. And the thing is a

thorn and a trouble to me.'

And the Hermit answered him and said, 'What you see in my eyes is

pity. Pity is what looks out at you from my eyes.'

And the young man laughed with scorn, and cried to the Hermit in a

bitter voice, and said to him, 'I have purple and pearls in my

hands, and you have but a mat of reeds on which to lie. What pity

should you have for me? And for what reason have you this pity?'

'I have pity for you,' said the Hermit, 'because you have no

knowledge of God.'

'Is this knowledge of God a precious thing?' asked the young man,

and he came close to the mouth of the cavern.

'It is more precious than all the purple and the pearls of the

world,' answered the Hermit.

'And have you got it?' said the young Robber, and he came closer

still.

'Once, indeed,' answered the Hermit, 'I possessed the perfect

knowledge of God. But in my foolishness I parted with it, and

divided it amongst others. Yet even now is such knowledge as

remains to me more precious than purple or pearls.'

And when the young Robber heard this he threw away the purple and

the pearls that he was bearing in his hands, and drawing a sharp

sword of curved steel he said to the Hermit, 'Give me, forthwith

this knowledge of God that you possess, or I will surely slay you.

Wherefore should I not slay him who has a treasure greater than my

treasure?'

And the Hermit spread out his arms and said, 'Were it not better

for me to go unto the uttermost courts of God and praise Him, than

to live in the world and have no knowledge of Him? Slay me if that

be your desire. But I will not give away my knowledge of God.'

And the young Robber knelt down and besought him, but the Hermit

would not talk to him about God, nor give him his Treasure, and the

young Robber rose up and said to the Hermit, 'Be it as you will.

As for myself, I will go to the City of the Seven Sins, that is but

three days' journey from this place, and for my purple they will

give me pleasure, and for my pearls they will sell me joy.' And he

took up the purple and the pearls and went swiftly away.

And the Hermit cried out and followed him and besought him. For

the space of three days he followed the young Robber on the road

and entreated him to return, nor to enter into the City of the

Seven Sins.

And ever and anon the young Robber looked back at the Hermit and

called to him, and said, 'Will you give me this knowledge of God

which is more precious than purple and pearls? If you will give me

that, I will not enter the city.'

And ever did the Hermit answer, 'All things that I have I will give

thee, save that one thing only. For that thing it is not lawful

for me to give away.'

And in the twilight of the third day they came nigh to the great

scarlet gates of the City of the Seven Sins. And from the city

there came the sound of much laughter.

And the young Robber laughed in answer, and sought to knock at the

gate. And as he did so the Hermit ran forward and caught him by

the skirts of his raiment, and said to him: 'Stretch forth your

hands, and set your arms around my neck, and put your ear close to

my lips, and I will give you what remains to me of the knowledge of

God.' And the young Robber stopped.

And when the Hermit had given away his knowledge of God, he fell

upon the ground and wept, and a great darkness hid from him the

city and the young Robber, so that he saw them no more.

And as he lay there weeping he was ware of One who was standing

beside him; and He who was standing beside him had feet of brass

and hair like fine wool. And He raised the Hermit up, and said to

him: 'Before this time thou hadst the perfect knowledge of God.

Now thou shalt have the perfect love of God. Wherefore art thou

weeping?' And he kissed him.

Footnotes:

(1) Plato's LAWS; AEschylus' PROMETHEUS BOUND.

(2) Somewhat in the same spirit Plato, in his LAWS, appeals to the

local position of Ilion among the rivers of the plain, as a proof

that it was not built till long after the Deluge.

(3) Plutarch remarks that the ONLY evidence Greece possesses of the

truth that the legendary power of Athens is no 'romance or idle

story,' is the public and sacred buildings. This is an instance of

the exaggerated importance given to ruins against which Thucydides

is warning us.

(4) The fictitious sale in the Roman marriage PER COEMPTIONEM was

originally, of course, a real sale.

(5) Notably, of course, in the case of heat and its laws.

(6) Cousin errs a good deal in this respect. To say, as he did,

'Give me the latitude and the longitude of a country, its rivers

and its mountains, and I will deduce the race,' is surely a glaring

exaggeration.

(7) The monarchical, aristocratical, and democratic elements of the

Roman constitution are referred to.

(8) Polybius, vi. 9. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(9) [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(10) The various stages are [Greek text which cannot be

reproduced], [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

(11) Polybius, xii. 24.

(12) Polybius, i. 4, viii. 4, specially; and really PASSIM.

(13) He makes one exception.

(14) Polybius, viii. 4.

(15) Polybius, xvi. 12.

(16) Polybius, viii. 4: [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(17) Polybius resembled Gibbon in many respects. Like him he held

that all religions were to the philosopher equally false, to the

vulgar equally true, to the statesman equally useful.

(18) Cf. Polybius, xii. 25, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]

(19) Polybius, xxii. 8.

(20) I mean particularly as regards his sweeping denunciation of

the complete moral decadence of Greek society during the

Peloponnesain War, which, from what remains to us of Athenian

literature, we know must have been completely exaggerated. Or,

rather, he is looking at men merely in their political dealings:

and in politics the man who is personally honourable and refined

will not scruple to do anything for his party.

(21) Polybius, xii. 25.

(22) THE TWO PATHS, Lect. iii. p. 123 (1859 ed.).

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